Club Statement: Ticketing
- Wigan Warriors apologise to supporters who faced issues with tickets for Friday’s home Betfred Super League fixture.
- Club provides supporters with updated information on the process and current situation.
Wigan Warriors would like to apologise to supporters who faced issues with tickets for the first home game of the 2024 Betfred Super League season against Huddersfield on Friday 1st March.
Following introducing the new ticketing platform with Ticketmaster Sport, the Club wishes to provide supporters with the following statement:
There is never an ideal time to make a change in such a business-critical platform. At the end of the 2023 season, in conjunction with Wigan Athletic, the Club decided to replace the existing ticketing platform. Unfortunately, due to several factors, the actual process of making the transition to the new platform only began in mid-December which created an extremely short timescale to implement the system and process tickets prior to the start of Wigan Warriors’ 2024 season. Furthermore, additional complexities arose due to the change being in the middle of Wigan Athletic’s 2023/2024 season and we needed to ensure we had a transitional plan in place that worked effectively for both Clubs.
The vision for the change was driven by all the right reasons – we wanted to ensure that we could allow priority tickets for Season Ticket holders, offer all fans the opportunity to be better connected with the Club and offer a programme that allowed fans to receive an enhanced experiences in and around the stadium. To achieve this aim we also needed to reinstate the Fortress GB access control system and commission a full upgrade of the system, which was implemented between the 12th and 22nd February 2024.
The new permanent Ticketmaster Sport system was ready for use in early February, but then had the challenge of importing season ticket holder data and activating accounts in a short space of time. Ticketmaster also needed to be fully integrated with the Fortress access control system before any tickets could be allocated. Ultimately this gave the club a very short window after the Betfred World Club Challenge fixture to issue tickets. Even with the challenges to this point, we still believed that we would be able to deliver supporter’s tickets in time for the first home game.
However, It became apparent in the week leading up to the first home game of the season that there were errors with the imported data resulting in incorrect seats being allocated and issued. The base data held by the Club was correct, however, the data imported into Ticketmaster Sport appeared to have errors in the seating allocations. As a result, we made the decision to issue single issue tickets for the first home game, with our main priority ahead of Huddersfield being to ensure that no supporter was locked out of Friday’s game.
Ticketmaster Sport are currently investigating the cause of the misallocation of seats and will rectify the issue this week. We will then be in a position to fulfil all season tickets thereafter, well in advance of the next home fixture.
Both Wigan Warriors and Wigan Athletic have made a significant investment in implementing the new ticketing platform and upgrading the access control system. Despite the problems that we encountered over the last few weeks, we remain confident that the revised solution will ensure that fans receive a positive ticketing experience in the longer term.
We thank everyone for their support and patience during this transitional period.
