Lawson/Loppi System Trouble

[jaymee 405]

This tweet from a girl who had a bad experience with Lawson canceling her tickets is making the rounds on Japanese Twitter. Although this might be a rare situation, just something to note in case someone here experiences the same trouble.

 

 

To summarize:

 

She got an e-mail that her pre-sale ticket reservation was approved and paid for them at Lawson. After that, she then receives an e-mail that her tickets have been cancelled, so she calls Lawson customer service to figure out what's up. The female operator tells her that her tickets were cancelled that morning, and assumes she cancelled them. The girl insists she wasn't the one that cancelled them, has already paid, and asks if the tickets can be re-validated/re-issued. The operator says that this isn't possible, and the girl asks if she can look into the details/status of the cancellation. The operator obliges, and the girl is switched to someone higher up, this time a male operator. 

 

The male operator tells her that it will take up to two weeks to look into the situation, but even if the reason is found, the tickets still will not be able to be re-validated/re-issued. The only thing she can do is try another pre-sale or wait for the general sale. He also states that they usually don't refund ticket sales, but since she didn't cancel the tickets herself, they will refund her if she sends the receipt.

 

Lawson calls her back a second time, this time a higher up representative than before. He tells her they didn't find any evidence she had cancelled the tickets herself. He also tells her customer service has been notified in detail about the situation, however it doesn't change the fact that they cannot re-validate/re-issue the tickets. They tell her to feel free to share her story online, etc. in case there are people with similar issues.

 

They call her back a third time, to report that it was some kind of system error that caused her approved ticket reservation to disappear from the system. They apologize and tell her to try again for the general sale tickets. There's nothing she can do so she has no choice but to let it go.

 

 

However, what's interesting is that from this, a lot of commenters have reported about instances where Lawson has double-booked tickets, given out incorrect reservation numbers  (numbers that are too long to fit into the Loppi reservation machine), given tickets for areas that were off-limits/not being used on the day of, and failed to send tickets out in a timely manner.

 

Some events/artists only sell through Lawson, so this is obviously worrisome for many. Anyways, might be something to keep in mind should you experience any strange errors when reserving live tickets.

[Zeus 7997]

I hope that girl had her receipts so she can get her money back. That's just sad. Someone needs to audit their systems code to look for bugs because stuff like that is not normal.

[jaymee 405]

Me, too!

Any (non-Japanese) programmer I've ever known has always said Japan is always at least a few years behind, and will code things in the most roundabout/mind-boggling way possible to avoid having to deviate from the already established way of doing things. It's a sad mentality that tends to cripple new talent in the field and create a lot of unnecessary bugs, lags, etc.

 

So in light of that I don't see Lawson really doing anything to improve its system... But even if they can't do that, if they could just stagger ticket sale start times on popular dates so the site doesn't crash or freeze during the reservation process (or become more prone to errors), that would be amazing. Even the in-store Loppi machine is prone to freezing.