Chaos caused by Gradball tickets

‘I wasted two hours of my life’

birmimgham gradball tab brum

Yesterday at midday, the Guild of Students website went into mayhem as the high demand of Gradball tickets resulted in the website crashing. This left many students devastated, as they were unable to purchase the tickets they wanted.

V sad times indeed

Gradball tickets are always highly sought after. It is the fabulous event where students celebrate their university experience with their friends. It has become a great tradition that students love going to, beginning with a meal in the Great Hall, in the beautiful setting of the Aston Webb building.

Celebrations then head outside to a party with Old Joe, where there is live music from famous acts (we still don’t know who it will be this year), and a massive fun fair.

That’s not all. There is then an after party at Fab, starting the night at 6.30pm and finishing at 6am: it is a night of hard-core partying.

However, many students couldn’t get the tickets they wanted – or even any tickets at all.

There were 4 tickets available to students. A VIP ticket included the meal, event and after party. There was also a slightly cheaper ticket which did not include the after party. These were available to buy from 12 noon and were sold within the hour. Clearly there were not enough tickets for Brum students.

Speaking to the Tab, third year student Meg said: “I’m so pissed off, like it’s Gradball, they should make it big enough for everyone, it’s the last celebration!

“I wasted two hours of my life and I didn’t even get a ticket for the part of it I wanted. It’s unfair that people can bring their friends from home and boyfriends and non-graduating students can go, it’s our last year, we should get priority!”

George said: “It was the most stressful 45mins of my life.”

It seems the Guild resolved their issues from last year where a mix-up meant tickets went on sale hours before the release time. The majority of tickets were sold before the time they were meant to have been available for purchase. However, this doesn’t make the struggle students faced this year any easier.

Good one… At least over 1,000 students liked this snapchat shot on Facebook.

Due to the server connection problems, third year student Ciara said that she and her house mates found it extremely difficult to get tickets.

She said: “The tickets were in our basket, but every time any of us put in our card details, the payment failed. We tried everything, changing browsers, different cards etc. Eventually we got tickets but it turned out that our bank had been authorising every payment that we were being told failed! The amount of times we tried meant we’d ended up spending over a grand each, and like five or six grand in total.

“When we rang up the banks, we kept getting laughed at on the phone! It’s ridiculous because even though I trust the money will be returned to our accounts, the whole thing was crazy. What’s crazier is that we were the luckier ones, actually having tickets in the end despite all the mania!”

But it’ll be worth it

Despite all the pandemonium cause by the stressful ticket situation, hopefully the event will make it all worthwhile, and students will have the send-off they deserve.