WATCH | Stadium management hires company to help fans scan tickets

Bertie Grobbelaar, CEO of Stadium Management SA, has revealed that an independent company has been hired to scan tickets at Saturday’s Soweto derby in the hope that it will mitigate the glitches that their new digital ticketing system has been experiencing since it was piloted in January.

During last Wednesday’s league game between Orlando Pirates and Mamelodi Sundowns at FNB Stadium, where more than 61,000 tickets were sold, thousands of spectators had to bypass the turnstiles without their tickets being scanned, as most self-service scanners had stopped functioning, resulting in congestion.

Grobbelaar told Sowetan: “Lessons learnt? I think that where we tried to expedite the process by allowing people to scan for themselves, that actually delayed the process. So, in the derby, we are going to have scanning staff members from Fan Services to do the scanning at the first validation scanning point.

“We can’t go into the derby where we allow illegitimate ticket-holders to occupy the venue and we leave legitimate ticket-holders outside.” — Bertie Grobbelaar

“Fan Services is an independent company. They will physically scan the phones or the tickets.”

Grobbelaar would not divulge how much the company forked out to bring Fan Services on board, but the exercise obviously adds to the costs, whereas removing companies such as TicketPro and Computicket was meant to be a cost-saving measure.

Grobbelaar chalked up the chaos at last week’s Pirates-Downs fixture mainly to late arrivals but also admitted the failure of the scanning process at the turnstiles.

“The congestion that was created an hour before kick-off created the problem,” he said.

“We had positive feedback from the patrons that arrived before that hour and very negative feedback from people who arrived within that hour.

“There’s a perception that some of the turnstiles weren’t working. From a technical perspective, I’ve got a report from the ticketing company [that says] of the 126 turnstiles that were opened on the day, six failed due to platform technical issues and there were another eight that failed when people tried to force their way through... The gears stripped, so it’s not the total failure of the turnstile system.”

Grobbelaar said he knew that the new ticketing system would experience teething problems and braced himself for criticism.

“I knew all along that it wasn’t going to be a smooth ride... but I am willing, on behalf of the venue authority, to take the shots on the nose now because we need to get this right,” Grobbelaar said.

“We can’t go into the derby where we allow illegitimate ticket holders to occupy the venue and we leave legitimate ticket holders outside.”

Grobbelaar reiterated the positives of the new digital ticketing system, which was introduced to prevent holders of fake tickets from entering the stadium.

“The user-friendliness of the platform and how you can easily purchase on the platform and transfer tickets are some of the positives of this system,” Grobbelaar said.

Sowetan