OvationTix Reviews 4

Trying to purchase tix to Elks Theatre in Prescott, AZ but cannot get past the "Rotate to Portrait Mode". My tablet is already in Portrait Mode. All I can see is the event details through a dark screen and cannot order tix!

Bright spots: the calendar view is well-designed, and the seat chart works well. It's got a nice little loading icon, shaped like a ticket. Initially, this feels like a promising customer experience.

Otherwise, the site has been borderline non-functional.

The UI is generally clunky and non-intuitive. It suffers from a lot of minor issues that add up to a frustrating, alienating experience overall.

The cart has two nested scroll sections within an unnecessarily small space, so you can't view the whole cart at once, despite having plenty of page space, and the stacked scrolls are confusing and clunky. Really needs more room to breathe.

Once you arrive at the billing information and subsequent info-collection, there's a third scroll within the left frame of the screen, but this is controlled via the main page scroll. So we're four scrollers deep if you're counting. When you reach the top of this left scroll-column, the whole page jumps suddenly. Nothing that prevents use, but it's unpleasant.

The cart-reservation timer ticking down is given in red, which is a pressure-sales tactic I don't appreciate.

As I write this, I'm attempting to buy tickets. I have been doing so for about half an hour now. The website will not load. Not a 404 page. Not an internet connection failure. Just a white screen. Refreshing does nothing. I have now switched browsers (from Firefox to Safari), and after some loading time, the screen resolved into a usable calendar view.

Having access to a refund policy costs extra. This surcharge is provided via a third party (middlemen upon middlemen) but this charge is not revealed until after billing information is collected. This is manipulative.

Upon (finally) reaching the "Place Order" option, there's a check-mark with a details/privacy link that ... doesn't have a tag explaining what it does. Clicking the link opens a totally blank popup. (Maybe this would have been a sign up for the production company's newsletter but no information was provided? Either way, appeared broken.) The "email updates from TheatreMania.com" query is auto-filled as a yes, which doesn't actually provide an opportunity for the customer to affirmatively consent to the newsletter. It's a spam-adjacent practice, and I don't love it.

"I agree to the/terms and conditions" is two fonts, slammed together. And the order button is similarly slammed. "Place Order$99.00."

Does this affect usability? No, but it feels shoddy.

The "terms and conditions" is only a handful of sentences which appear in a pop-up rather than a dedicated T&C page, some of which indicate the NO REFUND policy. I'm not sure the terms and conditions listed on the ticket are the same ones listed at checkout. I can't find purchase T&Cs on the ovationtix.com main page for clarification. The poor accessibility and explaination re: legal policies is not unusual compared to most websites, but that doesn't make it less of a problem. (Especially considering the entire service here is to provide an agreement -- tickets.)

The 10% "convenience charge" is poorly labelled. This has not been convenient. Please call it something else. (Or preferably make the service more convenient.)

Clicking "View Order Details" in the confirmation email resulted in a javascript "page processing error" message initially. It's since worked.

I have successfully placed an order now, and the show I'm seeing is going to be excellent (I've seen it before, going for a second time). Everything is looking up from here.

None of the issues I've mentioned ultimately prevented that, but for a business where a large portion of the service provided is the customer-facing website, I would expect ... a better website.

And where I could have had a pleasant user experience, I did not.

We have a group going to an event. I could not get all the tickets together, so i tried to delete some of the tickets in my cart. Turns out, you can't delete a ticket, the error says "This would leave a single seat open." But, you also can't delete 2 tickets, you have to click the garbage can next to each ticket. So there is no way to change it. I had to start over, and by that time they were sold out. Very, very poor design.

Impossible to change/amend a booking, even minutes after payment. The schedule they make available for tours/events to select from is one page/month, thus tiny on a mobile device.
And the email they give on the invoice to contact in case of problems provides the response that it is not being monitored.