The Newcastle United ticket office looks not quite up to the standards that we would expect | OneFootball

I just got back from the San Siro yesterday (Wednesday) evening.

I’m absolutely buzzing about the experience but also absolutely shattered, particularly after the walk back into town when the Milan metro shut down after the game. Thanks to the lads who helped me out when I got stuck the wrong side of the barriers to the tram way and was having difficulty climbing over. As a 67 year old it takes me longer to recover than it used to and I’m not as nimble as I once was.

Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the trip and I’ve been sorting out travel arrangements for Dortmund this morning, hoping I can get a match ticket.

Which brings me on to the subject of this letter – difficulties at the Newcastle United ticket office.

I’ve just read about the broken promises regarding Champions League three match packages for members and I wanted to let you know about the issues I encountered with West Ham away tickets.

Last Thursday, 14th September, I saw an article on the club website saying that tickets for the West Ham game on 8 October had gone on sale. It then went on to say that they went on sale to season ticket holders with 100+ points on Thursday 31st August. This was an obvious error, it looked like the article had been cut and pasted from the one two weeks earlier for Sheffield United tickets, and the dates hadn’t been changed.

So I went onto the buy tickets page to see what the current points level was so I could work out when the points would drop to 80 points at which point I would have enough to buy a ticket. However, I could see absolutely nothing about West Ham tickets when I logged on to the buy away tickets page of the website. I expect that when the page was set up, access to view the summary had been blocked for everyone who didn’t have enough points to buy a ticket. Normally access to buy a ticket is blocked but you can always see the summary requirements, but not on this occasion. As a result, I wasn’t sure when the tickets had actually gone on sale and what the points requirement was standing at.

So on Saturday before the Brentford match I popped into the Newcastle United ticket office to clarify things. They confirmed that tickets went on sale on 14 September and that the points level had reduced to 90 points on Friday 15 September. So I expected that the daily reduction would reduce the required points to 80 on Monday 18 September and just after I landed in Milan on Monday afternoon, I logged on to the website, everything was visible and I got a ticket for the game. I’ve not been tracking things since Monday but I see that the points requirement is due to reduce to 60 points today (Thursday 21st September) at 2pm. At the time of writing there are still over 1,500 seats available and it looks like the promise of a daily points reduction has missed a day somewhere between Monday and Thursday of this week.

Apologies for the excessive detail, but the Newcastle United ticket office looks like it’s not quite up to the standards that we would expect.

Good communication with supporters, living up to promises made, giving as much time as possible to enable supporters to make travel plans, would all help the supporter experience.