Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

1 Comment(s)

HALIFAX - Elton John fans hoping to buy tickets online for the pop star's two Halifax concerts found themselves hard pressed to do so when they went on sale Friday morning.

Some frustrated fans abandoned their computers and headed for the box office at the Halifax Metro Centre, where John will perform two shows on Sept. 26-27.

The two concerts sold out in about an hour.

One hopeful concert goer waiting outside the box office said a friend had been waiting for more than half an hour at a countdown page to buy her tickets.

Fred MacGillvray, president and CEO of Trade Centre Ltd., insisted the website was working and there were no problems with the Internet ticket-selling system.

He said the thousands of people who tried to buy tickets online created a long queue and had to wait their turn.

"You can't refresh (the page), you can't do anything, you're just stuck there," said Stephanie Perkins who waited in line while her friend searched for tickets at home.

"It's crashing. That's why I ran over here. I wasn't planning to, but I heard there were only 50 people in line."

MacGillvray said he heard complaints that the service was slow, but not that it had crashed.

"We're selling tickets at the moment over the Internet," he said at about 10 a.m.

"There's 23,000 tickets being sold, so you'll get a queue. ... It's just a lot of people requesting tickets at the same time."

John will perform in Atlantic Canada for the first time. Besides the two Halifax shows, he will play Sept. 28 in Moncton, N.B., Sept. 30 in Saint John, N.B., and in St. John's, N.L., on Oct. 2 and Oct. 3.