The COVID-19 pandemic has hit a lot of companies hard, including ticket companies, which is now leading to frustration.

Mosaic Place was forced to cancel concerts from ZZ Top and High Valley as well as Moose Jaw Warrior games because of the pandemic and those who bought tickets have yet to receive refunds from Ticket Rocket.

Spectra and Mosaic Place district general manager Ryan MacIvor said Ticket Rocket is based out of British Columbia where the reopening guidelines are different from Saskatchewan’s and it can cause delays in getting refunds out.

“All the different ticketing companies are all working through the process of issuing and delivering refunds and what the process is and COVID hasn’t been helpful to the situation because businesses have been shut down so they haven’t been able to go to their office to do their work,” MacIvor said.

Ticket Rocket’s head office was supposed to be in contact with those who purchased tickets to go through the refund process. Those who have not heard from Ticket Rocket are asked to email support@ticketrocket.co.

MacIvor said the process of getting your money back could take more time than usual.

“People will need to be patient and I know that is really difficult to be patient in this very challenging economic climate we are in and under the pandemic,” MacIvor said. 

“I know people are owed this money for their refunds. I can totally understand where they are coming from.”

He added that these are unprecedented times for ticket companies as well. Along with COVID-19 restrictions, their workload is a lot higher. Instead of dealing with refunds for one or two concerts, they are dealing with refunds for hundreds of concerts.

On their New Zealand website, Ticket Rocket released the following statement on June 30 about event refunds:

Hello Everyone,

As you may have read, we are facing some big challenges at the moment, but we wanted to reassure you that we are still in business and still working through the outstanding refunds. We acknowledge and accept that this process is taking a lot longer than you or we would like.

To give some colour and context, we are currently handling several thousand manual refunds. This means collating bank details from support emails, uploading them into our database and then loading those into the banking system for payment. On average, we can get through around five or six of these an hour - call it ten minutes each. With reduced staff on reduced hours, it means we're able to process around forty a day. Add to that the emails back and forth with everyone (and here we also acknowledge that we've not yet been able to reply to everyone - yes, we hate auto replies, too), and you can quickly do the math to see the size of the mountain we are climbing. And that doesn’t even bring into account the day to day work.

We hope that this illustrates the challenge of the workload and some of the effect of COVID lockdown on our little ticketing company, with the total elimination of revenue. Through this, our small team continue to deliver their finest, working undaunted through these tough conditions and deserve applause for their efforts. To those fantastic few who have voiced their support and understanding, thanks again - those kind words make a real difference to our team.

We are here, we’re working on it and we’ll be in touch soon.

Updates will be posted to this page. Please check back.

Sincerely,

Ticket Rocket.

#onebiteatatime

#maninthearena

Discover Moose Jaw News reached out to Ticket Rocket's Victoria, B.C. office and received an automated message that said the following:

"Thank you for calling Ticket Rocket. Currently, due to the high volume of COVID-19 related requests and messages we are strongly urging customers to email support@ticketrocket.co. We will continue to rely any updates from event promoters as we get them through our Facebook page. We also ask for patience as we get through each request as soon as we can. Thank you."

As of July 9, it appears Ticket Rocket's Facebook page for their Victoria operations was down.

The city has also ended its partnership with Ticket Rocket as of June 1 and request of proposals are currently out for a new ticketing company.