I'll Have 60 Tickets for Elton John! Now! (Aloud.com)

Member Name: SpankMarvin

Product:	Aloud.com
Date:	09/08/01 (211 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, Pretty quick, Secure

Disadvantages: Delivery time (sometimes), It is also easy to buy Robbie Williams tickets

I hate ticket shops - you know, the ones you get in London which look suspiciously like a taxi rank or a dodgy kebab shack. Which is why, when flicking through the broadsheet-style pages of the NME, I found a gig advertised which I thought I'd like to go to and decided to try going online instead. Using a search engine, I stumbled across aloud.com, and took a visit.

And what a good job I did. The homepage, despite its rather cluttered look, is actually very easy to navigate, its black background and tame colour schemes being pleasing to the eye. The pleasant surprises didn't end there either!

"So please, tell me, what on earth does aloud.com sell you?"

Well, you should really know by now, but in case you don't, aloud.com sells tickets to all sorts of gigs, be they rock, dance, pop, slack rhythm, speed jazz, hotel-smack punk or hiperty-hop in style. They also sell festival tickets.

"Ooh, and how does it sell it? Tell me!"

Ok. The idea is that you find your gig, and decide if you want to buy tickets. You then have two options. Firstly, you can enter in your credit card and personal details online, together with how many tickets you want, or alternatively, for those who suffer from cyberspace paranoia, you can use the good old-fashioned blower to speak to a nice person, and do the whole thing using the gift of voice.

"Hmm, nice. So how is the site to use then?"

Well, as I've said above, it is quite easy to look at. However, the really good thing about this site is the ways in which you can search for your gig. You can search by band name, by venue, by area and by date. The site is fast and accurate, and as expected uses secure pages for submission of all personal details. Having entered these, there is always a final warning screen telling you that THIS IS IT!!! You are buying when you click BUY! However, this is the one area of the site that I w
ould say "Gosh! Be careful!" It is perfectly safe, but once you have committed, it takes a little longer to process the page. Whatever you do DO NOT go back on your browser to try again. I did this once and bought twice the amount of tickets I wanted. Just wait for it, because it will eventually process your order! Once this is done, it gives you an order identification number for any enquiries. The site also contains information about the location of the venue and how to get there. Useful.

"Enough. Tell me about the delivery."

A bit hairy sometimes this one. I have never ever had a problem with the delivery of my tickets, and I have used aloud.com many times before, both by ordering online and over the phone; it makes no noticeable difference to the delivery time depending on which ordering method you use. What is sometimes a bit scary is how close to the gig date they have arrived. Rest assured however that they will arrive before your gig date, but be wary that this might be within a week of the gig! The service is reliable using recorded delivery, and apart from the tickets I don't receive any other post from aloud.com.

"Customer service?"

Very good. As I said earlier, I made a bit of an error using the web page which meant having too many tickets. So I phoned up and told them that I had too many tickets. They checked, and said "Okay then, send them back and when we receive them we will credit your account". I sent the unwanted tickets back, and was re-credited quicker than you could say "Quick! Re-credit me!"

Aloud.com is certainly the easiest way to order tickets that I have come across, and beats the other online ticket ordering services with a great big cyberstick. Each gig advertised is clearly labelled with whether there are not many tickets left or if they are going fast, and the whole ordering process is pretty quick and painless. So now
you can watch as many death-metal bands as you want in Brixton! Hurrah!

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