Most of the folks that waited in line for Elton John tickets at the Covelli Centre walked away happy Friday morning.
"I'm so excited," said Tracy Santiago. "I've waited my whole life to see him. i know everything about him. i just love him so much."
You could get a ticket if you were willing to fork up the $139 for the most expensive seats. The lower priced seats were gone in less than five minutes.
But while things at the box office went smoothly, for people trying to purchase tickets from Ticketmaster.com, it was another story. We received numerous complaints in our newsroom from people who were at their computers at 10a.m. but could not get seats.
"Had everything ready to go, just hitting the button, and could not get us tickets," said Vicki DiGregrio. "It was horrible. It was terrible. It's very unfair. We just wanted the tickets to get Elton John."
Early numbers indicated 12,000 people were on Ticketmaster when tickets went on sale, and with only 7,000 seats available, that became a problem.
Some of the frustration lies in the fact that online ticket brokers apparently had no trouble getting their hands Elton John seats. In just 15 minutes, tickets started popping up on several sites, charging anywhere from $137 to almost $1,000.
"If you're buying online, you have the same opportunities that the box office does," said Eric Ryan, Covelli Centre's executive director. "That's why you can sell 80,000 tickets to a stadium show in less than four or five minutes. It's just the power of the Internet. We did everything we could to let people know, that obviously, that could happen."
At the Covelli Centre box office, the doors opened about 5 minutes early for people in line, some of them waiting since early Thursday afternoon. The 30-minute sell out smashed the previous record for the Carrie Underwood concert by seven and a half hours.
Bean O'Neill was the second person in line, waiting some 19 hours.
"Fantastic! We got em, we're in!" O'Neill said, clutching his six tickets.
