Saturday, August 25, 2012

Initial Ticketing Experiences

On Twitter, appears people have been generally having favourable experiences with the new online system for picking tickets for the My Choice packages. One person mentioned an issue with quantities not showing up in a dropdown, but they said something about switching from alpha to date selection solved the problem.

I'll post more information once I've had a chance to go through the system myself.

Update (2012/08/25 8:48 AM): Check out In a TIFF for a description of the online ticketing process and some tips.

Update (2012/08/25 9:02 AM): Check out matthew5000's comment for more info on the process.

13 comments:

Any word on if anything has sold out already?

Per @larry411 on twitter, both screenings of On the Road have sold out. The 8pm opening night Gala of Looper is also apparently off sale.

I used the package fulfillment interface this morning; I'd say it's easy to use and fairly well designed. I got 30 tickets to 21 different screenings, and finished comfortably in 20 minutes. A few nitpicks:
(1) If you choose the "by schedule" view, you first get a September calendar to choose the date (which is fine) but then it lists all the films alphabetically on that date. A list ordered by start time would be more intuitive.
(2) After you click "choose film", it goes back to the September calendar, so you have to click again on the date. I found this inconvenient because I had all my screenings ordered chronologically. It would have been better to go back to the date I was on before, or at least have that date highlighted when I return to the September calendar.
(3) I happened to notice two screenings already "off-sale": Short Cuts Canada Programme #3 on Sept 10 and Short Cuts Canada Programme #4 on Sept 11. There doesn't seem any way to get that information beforehand though (is there?). What I mean is, it would be very helpful if, say, half an hour before your start time you could check on all your first-choice screenings and find out which are off sale, without being logged in yet.
(4) In the flowchart diagram at the top of the window in the interface, after you've started choosing films there is one button for "Logout" and another button for "Checkout". I have a feeling that some people will be confused by this, and click on Logout when they ought to click on Checkout, which might be catastrophic for them.
(5) In the Shopping Cart list, I wish they had given more thought to readability. For example, the "date and time" column needs to be wider so that the AM/PM indicator stays on one line with the time of day. Alternatively, they could just make it a nonbreaking space between the time and the AM/PM, so that line 1 would be "Mon 2012-09-10" and line 2 "9:15 PM". Also I'm normally in favour of the international date format, but in this particular case I would rather they used "Mon Sept 10" (omitting the year 2012).

I noticed that the Inatiff blogger suggested IE for Windows. The browser I used was Firefox for Macintosh and I had no problems.

I certainly would not use Safari with the TIFF web site (it doesn't even work properly navigating the film search on tiff.net). Also, obviously, I would recommend against doing your package fulfillment with an iPad or any other tablet/phone; I have a feeling that might be nightmarish.

Mathew500, When they give you a time is it in Eastern Time Zone??

The email that I had listed "EST" by the time, which I found ambiguous because Toronto is on EDT at the moment, not EST (a one-hour difference).

I actually tried with safari and chrome on mac and it was a disaster
the select by schedule option did not show any kind of calendar and selecting a film by title resulted only in "no criteria matched your selection" or something like that
then if i tried to change to a different letter to search for titles no films were listed at all
I called in to the box office and that worked just fine

So should I go by EST or EDT time?

I would love to hear from an official TIFF representative whether the time slots have been expressed in EST or EDT; personally I do not know.

I'm doing whatever is earlier.

Just made my 20 ticket flex-pack selection without a hitch. The process was once again smooth and easy to navigate, and fortunately I got all the films/screenings I'd intended to!! Used Safari on Mac. Only problem was I noticed once or twice that no films were showing up under the 'Title' option under 'Select Film', but I just went into 'Date' and was able to get them there. Absolutely ecstatic!

I just placed my order, 60 tickets in 13 minutes. Got all the first choices. No additions to sold out screenings beyond what's on the other post's comments. Will post additional details and screenshots later today. Thanks to inatiff's and matthew5000's tips for ensuring a smooth order.

I think the timeslot says EST but is actually EDT? My timeslot is today at 8am EST per email but I just tried logging in and was denied.

My experiences at the Toronto International Film Festival. Note this blog is not affiliated with the Toronto International Film Festival Group or the festival itself.
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