Okay, so I'm a little peeved. It looks like 2024 will be the first year
that I get to miss HoliWood Nights, and I believe only the second year
since 1995 that I'll miss an "annual" Holiday World all-club event. And I
kind of expected it; they're now doing the event ticket sales with a ticket
drop in the middle of the day on a work day, which means that since my
employer has dragged me back into the office, I can't just sit here and
fight that qnza website while I work as I did last year. But I did book
vacation time so that when the appointed time came 'round I could plop
myself into the queue and at least try.

And it seems that Holiday World had the right idea...they closed their
online store for two hours before the ticket drop, and while the system
allowed people into a queue, that queue was presumably flushed when the
store opened and the tickets dropped. Which is why when I waited until the
appointed time, I bounded into the queue for...a 75 minute wait.

It seems that their e-commerce provider set the system up so that if there
were people waiting in the queue, yes, those people got flushed out when
the store reset. But then those people waiting got automatically added to
the new queue when the store opened. That's the behavior you want if the
store *crashes*, which for this company you can kind of expect to happen.
But when you are intending to open the queue at the appointed time, doing
it that way actually defeats the purpose of flushing the queue before
opening the store! And for the system to not actually broadcast an alert to
the people waiting to let them know that the tickets had sold out while
they were waiting...well, that's two more items that are borderline
malpractice on the part of the provider.

So I am, naturally, a little disappointed, in no small part because it's
pretty much the only time in the entire summer season that one can actually
ride the Voyage at night, and it's the only time *ever* that they run it
with the brakes off, as its designers intended. I'll figure out another way
to get there in 2024, and figure they saved me some money. But more to the
point, it sure seems that Accesso has a stranglehold on the amusement
industry online ticketeing process, and they happen to be really bad at it,
finding creative new ways for the platform to fail pretty much every time I
am forced into using it. I can't be the only one who has noticed this...can
I? How are these guys even still in business?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
/X\ _ *** Respect rides. They do not respect you. ***
/XXX\ /X\ /X\_ _ /X\__ _ _ _____
/XXXXX\ /XXX\ /XXXX\_ /X\ /XXXXX\ /X\ /X\ /XXXXX
_/XXXXXXX\__/XXXXX\/XXXXXXXX\_/XXX\_/XXXXXXX\__/XXX\_/XXX\_/\_/XXXXXX
NEW! When emailing this account, include the 'canonical magic word' in
the body of your message for a quicker response.

I’ve never been to this event. Does it actually sell out if you’re not there the exact second tickets are available?

Surf Dance Chris <surfdancec@aol.com> wrote: : I?ve never been to this
event. Does it actually sell out if you?re not there the exact second
tickets are available?

It did this year. But again, I think that's as much Accesso's fault as
anything else. Had they actually purged the queue to remove the campers (as
they said they were planning to do) or even just, you know, not taken queue
reservations before the store opened, we might have had a few minutes.

I entered the queue at 12:01 EST, was given a 75-minute wait time, and then
once my wait time was over, the event was sold out. It took an hour or more
for the event to sell out, but there were enough people in the queue to
account for all the tickets in the first minute or so.

That said, my gripe is less about yet another ticket drop mess (now that I
am back to working in an office, I figured I wouldn't be able to get a
ticket for HWN this year anyway) than Accesso's continuing failure to get
anything right. Like when I had to go through the process to renew my Cedar
Point pass twice because halfway through the process their site decided it
wasn't compatible with desktop Safari. Or for that matter,
desktop-anything. Or the problem of actually applying a discount code for a
Cincinnati Zoo ticket. Or even discovering that a service code exists to
allow me to buy a discounted ticket at Knott's Berry Farm. Or getting
through a transaction to visit the Columbus Zoo without the site just plain
crashing (that time I ended up buying my ticket at the gate). It's a comedy
of errors, different every time, but always infuriating.

Perhaps my favorite example is from the 2021 IAAPA trade show. I paid a
visit to the Accesso booth and mentioned the troubles I'd had with Safari
on the Cedar Fair site, and one of their sales reps gave me a rather nice
ball point pen. The first time I tried to use it, the thing fell apart.
Useless as it is now, it's kind of my favorite industry tchotchke just
because it does such a good job of symbolizing the company that distriuted
it.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
/X\ _ *** Respect rides. They do not respect you. ***
/XXX\ /X\ /X\_ _ /X\__ _ _ _____
/XXXXX\ /XXX\ /XXXX\_ /X\ /XXXXX\ /X\ /X\ /XXXXX
_/XXXXXXX\__/XXXXX\/XXXXXXXX\_/XXX\_/XXXXXXX\__/XXX\_/XXX\_/\_/XXXXXX
NEW! When emailing this account, include the 'canonical magic word' in
the body of your message for a quicker response.