ICC World Cup 2019 | ICC offer 100% refund to all those affected by late ticket delivery at Trent Bridge
The International Cricket Council has released a statement saying it will be offering a complete refund to all those who got their tickets later than the stipulated time in the World Cup game between Pakistan and West Indies. They are also working on solutions to avoid the problem in future matches.
With tickets having been sold out long before the tournament commenced, a problem with cricket’s governing body’s systems meant that some fans were not delivered their tickets, even though they had bought them as back as a year ago. Twitter was quick to point out the inconvenience caused by it and the organizers received heavy backlash, to which they have now responded.
"What's happened is that we've got these tickets that weren't delivered and then we've also got people wanting to collect at venues from late sales," the tournament’s managing director, Steve Elworthy said.
"So it's 400 or 500 people to collect on a day - which is not unusual at some of the Test match grounds. But you bring four or five people with you that you've got tickets for, suddenly there's like 1600, 1700 people standing in a queue trying to get tickets. So it looks like there's a whole load of people there,” he added.
ICC had tied up with Ticketmaster, an American ticket sale and distribution company, for the ongoing World Cup and while more than 7,00,000 tickets have been delivered till now, there were still people at the tournament’s second game who had to collect theirs from the venue. This meant that the delay led to fans missing a major part of the action, with the match being wrapped in less than 35 overs combined for both the innings.
"The perfect storm was the fact that Pakistan got bowled out for 100. If the score was 200 for 3, these people would be seeing cricket until 6 o'clock. I probably still would have thought about a refund of some sort because they missed some of it, but it might not have been a 100% refund," Elworthy remarked.
The ICC released an official statement apologizing to fans and has worked up measures such as letting fans print their tickets at home through their account as well as improved handling of the situation at the grounds.
"The ICC Men's Cricket World Cup would like to apologise to any fans caught up in queues here at Trent Bridge today. We will be offering a full refund to anyone who was impacted by the delays because of the high volume of ticket collections. This will happen automatically based on data from our ticket scanners along with time of ticket issue from the box office.
"We are currently working with Ticketmaster to resolve all outstanding issues and have put in place a number of measures to ensure fans don't suffer this inconvenience at future games. This includes the introduction of a print at home ticket and improved distribution methods at the venues," the statement read.