You know waiting rooms from doctors, from offices and other places where you really don’t want to be. fans of the band Rammstein got to know the perfidious digital version of the waiting room on Thursday morning. At ten o’clock the presale for the band’s big European stadium tour 2023 started, for Germany initially with two concerts each in the Munich and Berlin Olympic Stadium.
Anyone who chose to leave the feature conference at 9:59 sharp and went to the website of Rammstein ticket dealer Eventim at 10:00 sharp did not end up on the booking page as usual, but in a waiting room. Urgent warning in red letters: Do not close this window or open another browser or you will lose your place in the queue. Below that was a small, Sisyphus-like man who was slowly moving from left to right in a gray corridor at a snail’s pace to indicate the remaining time until the link was forwarded to the actual website – without naming the specific time in numbers. In this case it was a good hour and a half.
During this time, the Rammstein-affine part of the internet had already exploded. In the social networks, the fans complained about the amateurish preparation by Eventim. To protect the company, one has to say that it is of course not their fault if there is much more demand than supply. So much demand that, for example, two more concert dates (already planned in the backlog) were activated for Munich by noon. Four times the Olympic Stadium, at most a handful of artists worldwide can do that. And even with other stadium-sized bands like that Rolling Stones for example, the tickets are not gone so quickly, but will be available for a long time.
Nowhere was it explained which places were hidden behind the 13 categories
Compared to the Stones (and more likely only those), who wanted a few hundred euros per ticket for the top categories, the Rammstein tickets are also almost cheap: they cost between almost 100 and almost 150 for the Munich gigs Euro. As far as the division of the individual categories was concerned, there was also annoyance from the fan side – not without reason.
Normally, with Eventim you can choose between best seat booking (the buyer chooses the category, the algorithm chooses the seats) and seating plan booking (the buyer looks closely at a plan where he wants to sit and directly chooses block Y8, row 60, seat 19 or whatever). That didn’t work in this case. Seating plan booking was disabled, probably because otherwise the system would have finally collapsed. But that meant that when you finally got out of the waiting room, you had to pretty much buy a pig in a poke. Nowhere was it explained in detail which places were hidden behind “category 1 – seat”, “standing place” or “fire zone”. There were a total of 13 different categories for Munich and the difference between “category 1 – seat – possibly visually impaired” and “category 5 – seat – possibly visually impaired” (yes, there were five different “possibly visually impaired” categories) one would have as a buyer then maybe quite willingly known before the day of the stadium visit. Because you don’t want to admire a headlight mast for 100 euros.
And because the site kept showing error messages even after the waiting room and you had to keep reloading, you were ultimately forced to buy something available. Seating plan bookings for other European cities such as Vienna or Budapest were certainly offered. Eventim has not yet commented on the problems and negative feedback on the Internet when asked by SZ.
Over the course of Thursday, tickets for all concerts kept falling back into the system, but all four Munich concerts seem to be “sold out” close to the stadium – unless Eventim is deliberately holding back tickets to promote the hype. A procedure that should not be unusual for concert tickets, even if nobody admits it. If you prefer it stress-free and have always wanted to travel to Lithuania: At least on Thursday afternoon you could still get tickets for Vilnius without any problems.