We had a great night last night. Niki said she wanted to get tickets for Rob Thomas at the Beacon Theatre in New York City months ago. We didn’t get them when they went on sale and figured we’d either skip the show or buy some on the ticket reselling service StubHub. We’ve had a great experience with StubHub in the past, so a few weeks back we bought 5th row seats. We were excited.
The show started at 7PM and there were two opening acts we wanted to see but we hadn’t eaten, so we had a quick dinner at the diner on the corner. At 8:10PM we walked to the show. As we passed an independent ticket salesperson (i.e., scalper) who was offering us a seat “upgrade” to the 13th row, I happily thought to myself “well for us that would be a downgrade.” How cool.
Niki and I have seen Rob with Matchbox 20 at Jones Beach and at Madison Square Garden. I saw a solo Rob Thomas show at Live8 in Philly. Niki and I also saw a solo Rob Thomas show with Jewel at Jones Beach and we saw Santana at Jones Beach when Rob came out to sing his monster hit “Smooth.” It’s safe to say we were both looking forward to this show.
The Beacon scanned our tickets and told us our tickets had already been used once and we couldn’t go in. We immediately realized that the person who printed these tickets at home made two copies: one for his friends and one to sell on StubHub. Or maybe he sold the other pair on Ebay.
We remained calm.
I talked to the people in the ticket office at the Beacon and they were incredibly supportive. They couldn’t do anything about the StubHub tickets besides confirm that they were, in fact, used 45 minutes before we tried to enter. They told us to call StubHub and the Beacon ticket rep gave us a free pair of second balcony, second-row-from-the-back seats — just in case we didn’t have any luck with StubHub. Wow. At this point we were Beacon fans for life.
I patiently explained our situation to StubHub. The first thing they did was take down my number in case we got disconnected. Very reassuring. They saw that I’ve used their service a bunch in the past and they connected me with a customer service manager. He apologized and quickly called the local ticket center. He said they had some replacement tickets for us, but we had to go get them ourselves.
I asked the Beacon team what the exact start time was for Rob’s set. They said 8:50PM. It was now 8:20PM. We jumped into a cab to begin our 70 block roundtrip. The ride downtown was slow, but the ticket handoff was fast. Their agent Matt handed us two sets of tickets: one was a pair in the first row and one was a pair in the second row. Amazing. At this point we were StubHub fans for life.
Our cab made its way back to the Beacon. We jumped out at exactly 8:50PM and still had time to get some drinks. Our first row tickets worked first try, no drama, and we spent the rest of the night just a few feet away from the super-talented Rob Thomas. It was incredible.
Brian Alvey 