FRINGE organisers were last night urgently contacting hundreds of Festival-goers after it emerged tickets to at least 20 shows for the opening weekend have been oversold in error.
The Scotsman has learned that continual problems with the Fringe box office system has led to significant overbooking for some of the most popular performances.
In one instance 155 extra tickets have been issued for a sell-out performance for abou
t 800 people by the Irish comedian Ed Byrne tonight.
In a desperate effort to head off chaos outside venues, the Fringe has hired extra staff to advise customers they will not be admitted. Disappointed ticket-holders will be offered alternative and complimentary shows.
The uncertainty led the veteran director of the Assembly Rooms, Bill Burdett-Coutts, to describe the problems as the worst experienced in the last 25 years of the Fringe.
"The Fringe set-up has been a mess from the start, and they have been hopeful of solving it throughout, but it hasn't happened," Mr Burdett-Coutts said. "We should have been ringing alarm bells a month ago.
"It's the biggest problem they have had in the entire time (27 years] I've worked here."
The Fringe officially opens on Sunday but many previews and shows began yesterday in so-called Week Zero.
Tony Wilkie-Miller, promoter of the Ladyboys of Bangkok, said: "Our box office is completely under siege at the moment. We're having to bring in extra staff to try and cope but our phone lines have gone mad. We really don't know if any performances have been oversold, it's impossible to tell.
"The whole thing is just complete lunacy. This is the world's biggest arts festival and it's hard to believe the Fringe box office hasn't been able to cope."
One senior source said: "We think there could be hundreds of shows which have been oversold. No-one is really sure at the moment, it's almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better. One of the big problems is the Fringe is telling us that it has sold its own allocation for a show when we don't think that's the case. Some shows may be oversold but other shows which are supposed to be sold out could turn out to be half empty."
One veteran Fringe performer told The Scotsman: "The big problem is no-one can rely on any box office information coming from the Fringe Office. If people are turned away from performances which are not sold out everyone is going to lose a helluva lot of money."
Jon Morgan, the Fringe director, played down the overbookings yesterday and said just 20 out of 32,000 performances were affected over the three-week festival, and that overselling happened every year. Box office systems were working smoothly yesterday.
He said: "We are working our way through the problems. Thousands of tickets were collected today and we sold many thousands more over the counter, telephone and on edfringe.com."
The overbooking issue is the latest twist in the saga of a faulty Fringe box office system that began when bookings crashed a month ago and was followed by the failure to print tens of thousands of tickets.
The Fringe has refused to give details of all the overbooked performances saying that people might try and falsely claim to have tickets if the shows were identified.
"We don't want to reveal all the performances because if they do there will be chaos," Mr Morgan added. "Phoning the customers has been something that's been going on for a number of days."
The "big four" venues, the Assembly, the Underbelly, the Pleasance, and the Gilded Balloon, have their own box office system, Via, which has been working smoothly.
It has now been introduced into the Fringe's own offices to work alongside its troubled system, with hopes it will keep problems to a minimum.
Anthony Alderson, the Pleasance venue director, said it was working to get tickets into people's hands, by printing tickets at the venue when necessary from the customer lists.
"It's a fall-back position. That seems today to be working reasonably well," he said. But he warned: "This weekend is when we are going to really feel the pressure."
The full article contains 709 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
