You can store your Ticketmaster tickets in your phone’s wallet (I use Google Wallet but I assume the iPhone has a similar system). The ticket will work even if you can’t login to Ticketmaster or even if your phone has no Internet connection at all.
Yes, it’s called Apple Wallet.
At this rate we won’t be able to participate in society without our Cybus Industry implants:
By coincidence, last night I used the Ticketmaster app to get into a concert. When the ticket’s barcode is displayed, there’s a continuously sweeping “cursor” in blue that sweeps back and forth over the barcode. Absent that movement the ticket won’t work. That screen even includes a warning: “A screenshot will not work for admission”.
The Major League Baseball ticketing app works similarly, but they have cute little baseball Icons zigging up and down.
Whenever I get a failure to log on problem like that, restarting the phone is my first move. About 95% of the time that works. The other thing to check is whether there is a pending update to that app. Some apps are good about popping up “This is an old version; update the app first”. Other apps stupidly don’t do that; they just fail mysteriously.
As others have said, uploading the ticket to your phone’s wallet app is the approved answer. That means you won’t be depending on the overloaded cell service at a concert. I’d wait until shortly before leaving home to do that, but it ought to be OK for the couple hours until you show the ticket taker the magic code.
Yes, uploading tickets to the phone’s wallet app is usually the best solution. But note, to connect this to the OP, the wallet is an app.
(For some reason tickets bought from AXS, which is Ticketmaster’s one big competitor, cannot be uploaded to the wallet. They can only be displayed using AXS’s own app. I find this very annoying.)
I have seen that sweeping blue line but since there is no user’s manual* with the damn app just chalked it up to Clarke’s third law. I guess I’ll move the tix to my Google wallet like the app and this threads’ suggestions but I’m not sure it’s currently installed, never mind how to use it.
I also have tickets to a performance at the Mesa Arts Center here in town. When I bought them the ticket .pdfs were sent in an email that arrived a few minutes later and they are waiting on my hard drive to be printed out the day of the performance come November. Much more intuitive.
*I am a firm believer in RTFM. In the Documents folder there is a sub-folder, Manuals, where all the .pdf user manuals go. There are currently 13 of them there, not counting the three Ikea assembly instructions.
Uploading [something] to a wallet requires that the [something] vendor apply to each of the several major wallet vendors and sort out something like a licensing agreement. And for each of those wallet brands they need to get a non-forgeable identity that their app can use to authenticate to the wallet that they really are e.g. Ticketmaster, not “fAkE TiKeTmAsTeR.”.
Then they need to update and test their app for each major mobile ecosystem. Then deploy those updated apps to all the stores.
All that is a lot of work if they’re a smaller business or aren’t crazy concerned about bar code security. Plenty of other ways for them to solve their actual problem, which is people trying to create fake barcodes that fool turnstile scanners, or reusing real barcodes to admit more than one person.
What is the basis of this recommendation? I’ve loaded tickets into my Wallet months in advance without any problem.
That all makes sense, except that AXS isn’t a small company. While they are smaller than Ticketmaster, they are owned by AEG, one of the world’s largest entertainment companies.
ETA: @markn_1 two posts up.
Well … My thinking is you want to get a fairly recent version of your tickets. Stuff changes. Maybe not the barcode / QR code itself, but something related.
I mentioned going to a Ticketmaster show last night. Two performances were scheduled and ~3 weeks before the show I bought tix to the second showing.
About a week before the show the sponsor / box office announced they were cancelling the second performance and reissuing a fresh ticket for the early show to anyone like me who had late show tickets. And to the degree possible they’d honor your price tier, section choice, and seat choice(s). If they could not accommodate you in your price tier, they’d refund the difference. If you didn’t want to attend the early show at all they’d issue a full refund. Despite the tickets being widely labeled “non-refundable”.
Anyhow, later that day I checked the Ticketmaster app and sure enough I had two new tickets to the early showing with different seat assignments near my original seats.
I don’t know what would have happened if I had stored the original tickets in my e-wallet before the changes happened then tried to use the old late show tickets for admission to the early show.
That’s the sort of scenario I was concerned about. By waiting until near showtime you’re past the time that changes you may not have been aware of could still occur. IOW, by waiting you’re reasonably assured that what you install into your wallet is still current and valid. While still avoiding exposing yourself to the vagaries of connectivity at the moment of truth while they’re trying to scan your tickets for entry.
Airline boarding passes are similar. You can store them in your wallet, but given how often seat assignments change, maybe having an old boarding pass isn’t so useful compared to having a fresh one.
If a ticket stored in the wallet has a significant change, such as the show is cancelled or rescheduled, or the seating arrangement changes, a signal is sent to the wallet (don’t ask me how) which updates the ticket. It’s happened to me a few times. I’ll get a notification that a ticket has changed, and the change is highlighted in the wallet app.
I’m guessing the bigger problem is fraud. Suckers People buy a ticket off of Craigslist then at the venue they find that same barcode was sold four or five times and only the first one presented at the gate gets in.
@suranyi: Good to know; thank you. My belt and suspenders may be just useless paranoia on my part.
@DesertDog: Good point. It’s not strictly the venue or promotor’s fault that some jerk sold multiple people copies of a real (or fake) ticket. Ticket counterfeiting has been a thing since forever.
How much the venue / promotor really cares about how much a black market in real and fake tickets exists is sorta nebulous to me.
Security at the venue surely appreciates any steps taken because in such cases there’s generally a lot of yelling that ensues.
I’ve bought resold tickets on cashortrade quite a few times. I’m happier to get tickets transferred via an app rather than static PDFs, for exactly this reason. It’s practically impossible to transfer the same Ticketmaster ticket to multiple people, while it’s trivially easy to send the same PDF to multiple people. I was initially annoyed when Ticketmaster moved to non-printable tickets but now I think it’s a good thing for everyone.
I add the boarding pass to the Wallet as soon as it’s available. Any gate or departure changes automatically update themselves to the pass in the Wallet. There is no “old” or “fresh.” It’s all the same one.
Great. Thank you.
IIRC my main airline only plays nice with Apple wallet, not with any of the Android options. So for now I’m mostly out of luck. But if/when they make those connections, I’m in.