(SOLD OUT) Get your Head for Points 10th Birthday Party tickets at noon TODAY

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• Doommonger says:

  30 May30 May 18:02

  Unfortunately still closed, named after the late Marylin Chambers I’m reliably informed.

  Doomster

  • Blair Waldorf Salad says:

    30 May30 May 19:44

    She’s alive and well and living in Summer Bay according to the latest eps of Home And Away

  • MisterE says:

    30 May30 May 21:16

    The Club is open from Tuesdays onwards at 16:30. You have to be staying in a high category room, or else be Titanium in the Bonvoy progrsm

    • Tariq says:

      30 May30 May 22:24

      That’s what the hotel info says but I have read that it’s closed, so was looking for real world experience.

      • Tariq says:

        31 May31 May 13:25

        If it helps others, here is the official line from the hotel:

        “I am pleased to say that our wonderful The Chambers club is re-opening at its full capacity from tomorrow (1st June).”

        • Doommonger says:

          31 May31 May 15:08

          They have created a green door entrance in memory of the late Ms Chambers.

          Doomster

• Marc says:

  30 May30 May 20:09

  May I suggest that it might be time to allocating tickets by ballot.

  • Rob says:

    30 May30 May 20:20

    If I was sure they would sell out quickly, we would have split them into two chunks sold at different times, probably half on a weekend day. However, given it took 3 days to sell Christmas 2019 out and this was pre-‘work from home’ etc, we didn’t think it would sell out quickly.

    I told a reader who asked me at 11am if I could reserve him a ticket as he was going to a meeting that he shouldn’t worry as I expected them to still be there tomorrow, yet alone later today. Sorry about that ….

    I really don’t know where you think we are meant to find the time to deal with, say, 1000 ticket applications, manually draw them (which could be for 1-4 tickets each, which makes it even more complex), email those people, wait for them to pay, track incoming payments, respond when payment received, give them a final demand if they don’t pay, draw more names to fill in for non-payers, rinse and repeat etc. This company has 2.6 people working for it and usually one of those is away at any particular time.

    • memesweeper says:

      30 May30 May 21:35

      If you can’t find a ticketing-platform-as-a-service that can handle ballots, don’t even think about it! As someone who jumps on these things very quickly I’m perfectly happy for first-come-first-served to continue 🙂 Unless things have changed since I last checked neither eventbrite nor meetup.com could do this.

      Please restrict future sales to applicant +1 maximum.

      I know you are not keen on a non-London event due to fears of a low turnout, but I’m sure you could have announced this event in Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle or Edinburgh and sold it out.

      • memesweeper says:

        30 May30 May 21:38

        Incidentally, I can *walk it* to the venue you’ve chosen this summer, so I am perfectly happy for London to continue…

      • Rhys says:

        30 May30 May 21:38

        500 people in Newcastle? I doubt it!

        • memesweeper says:

          30 May30 May 21:53

          OK, Newcastle might be a stretch. But people are keen — I met someone at the first party who came from Glasgow. Personally I’d happily go to any of those cities if I could work around other commitments (which I almost certainly could for most dates).

          There are people who will fly needlessly, spending thousands of pounds, with dozens of changes of planes, from some obscure corner of Europe to Hawaii, and then not leave the airport, just to secure OW TPs. I’m pretty sure there’s a few hundred people who’ll buy an advance purchase ticket and ‘work from home’ for the afternoon on a train to get to this event.

          Whether or not you should bother given London works so well is up to you — but I’m sure if you did, it would succeed.

      • Rob says:

        31 May31 May 06:36

        If a hotel, keen for some PR, offers us a room, a cheap beer deal and £1k to cover trains and hotel then we’d do it.

        • Tariq says:

          31 May31 May 10:49

          Innside Newcastle! Come on Melia 😉

        • yorkieflyer says:

          31 May31 May 12:30

          I’d suggest the Crowne Plaza Sheffield so that Rob could kill two birds with one stone, but I recall him not been a fan of it!

        • Rob says:

          31 May31 May 15:10

          Dump!

    • Gagravarr says:

      30 May30 May 23:49

      As someone who was online at bang-on 12:00:02 and missed out on tickets due to Eventbrite hanging, I may be slightly biased, but…

      How about next time, only put 3/4 of the tickets on general sale, and secretly post a code in the comments for the rest? Means that those who are hard-core commenters and who are most likely to moan get in whatever, and the occasional reader still has a decent chance at coming

      • Yorkieflyer says:

        31 May31 May 08:28

        It’s really very simple as I and another commentator said up thread, restrict sales to 1 or 2 tickets per order

        • Rob says:

          31 May31 May 09:44

          I am guessing this would have freed up 20 tickets max, perhaps fewer. Can’t check at Rhys is still in Oxford and I’m in MRU.

        • Gagravarr says:

          31 May31 May 16:30

          If Rhys is still in Oxford tonight, happy to buy him a pint or two! Though that won’t help with him checking about ticket purchases… 🙂

• CheshirePete says:

  30 May30 May 21:02

  Perhaps in future the answer might be not to make so London centric. Have 2 events perhaps one in North also. I’m not really into the queueing for tickets malarkey at a certain dictated time. With technology this shouldn’t be necessary anyhow, and perhaps this entire process isn’t what most HfP readers might expect to go thru. Just my tuppence worth. Perhaps in 30
  Years the HfP annual disco might be at Earls Court for all I know!

  • Rob says:

    30 May30 May 21:23

    We couldn’t shift 100 tickets for an event in Manchester – that’s the bottom line. It is also impossible to organise whilst sitting in London and I’m not sure how the entire company is meant to decamp for 3-4 days given our various kids etc. Ticket revenue wouldn’t even cover our hotel and rail costs.

    • Gagravarr says:

      31 May31 May 00:13

      Organising 5 mates in a pub is easy. Getting 8 friends in a restaurant to correctly split the bill can be tricky. A sports group of 20 in a curry house – forget it. Follow the difficulty curve up to 100 and go mad. Push it through to 250+ and give up!

      (I have a few friends who work in events, and even after watching them I don’t know how they pull it off….)

      That said, maybe a TedX style approach could work? Few ground rules laid out, someone who hasn’t been a complete idiot on the forums volunteers, they find a pub willing to host a small group on a quiet night, H4P posts about it in a bits article, and if 5000 people plus 10 sponsors suddenly sign up then Rob can afford the babysitter? If not, 20ish people from the same city get to meet up and have a fun night, everyone’s happy!

  • georgeH says:

    30 May30 May 21:37

    “Perhaps in future the answer might be not to make so London centric”

    Not sure how you’ve come to that conclusion given how quickly it’s so out. In fact being London centric is obviously the right thing to do.

  • Yorkieflyer says:

    31 May31 May 08:30

    I think we should all be expert at this if you’ve ever nabbed 241 Avios tickets at midnight 355 days out!

• Will says:

  31 May31 May 01:19

  Doing one abroad would be awesome.

  Get one of the hotel chains to offer a night up exclusively to HfP readers for a reasonable sum of points as a publicity stunt.

  You clashed with Glastonbury festival, I guess that Venn diagram with HfP readers is quite a small overlap. There’s at least one in it I can report 😉

• Charles Martell says:

  31 May31 May 01:33

  Will there be a returns list?

  • Rob says:

    31 May31 May 06:33

    Eventbrite has a waiting list.

• ChrisC says:

  31 May31 May 01:46

  I hope the people who find they can’t go let Rob know so the tickets can be re offered.

  And perhaps limit it to a max of 2 rather than 4 per person in future.

  • Rob says:

    31 May31 May 06:33

    I’ll need to see how many people bought four. Very few, at a guess, given they had only 3-4 hours notice that we’d allow this.

    In retrospect, though, you are correct.

    You need to see it from our point of view though. Barclaycard is putting a LOT of money into this – around £15,000 – and it was vital that we delivered a full room. We genuinely had no idea how ‘work from home’ etc would impact ticket sales, and so we threw in everything in our toolkit to ensure tickets shifted.

    • Brian says:

      31 May31 May 10:07

      Here’s the thing – because the cost of the ticket is nominal, a lot of people will buy even if there is an off-chance that they can go. If they can’t go, they won’t care about losing £10. How about setting the cost of a ticket much higher and then giving people a refund for most of the cost on the day? Would that work??

      • Brian says:

        31 May31 May 10:08

        ‘off-chance that they CAN’T go’.

      • Rhys says:

        31 May31 May 11:20

        We already oversell because we know from experience that a certain % won’t come.

        Here’s the thing – there is more demand than supply. Unless we double capacity we will sell out, so someone will be disappointed.

  • Doommonger says:

    31 May31 May 15:10

    Are you going Chris?

    • Rob says:

      31 May31 May 15:46

      Our maths is based on the average no-shows from the last few years so we need that to continue 🙂

• ChasP says:

  31 May31 May 02:04

  sorry Rob but as you were so incorrect in your informed estimate on how many would apply for a London party why do you think your estimate for a Manchester one is any better ?

  • Rob says:

    31 May31 May 06:30

    Because we know, post our recent reader survey, exactly what % live in Manchester – and the 6pm weekday start means it’s very unlikely people will commute from Leeds, Sheffield etc.

    That said, as per the other comment, if a hotel offered to package it for us – so minimal work is required from our side apart from selling the tickets – and cover our travel and hotel costs then we’d do it, even for 100.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.