Cannes Ticketing Woes: Festival Makes New Fix to Free Up Tickets

The Cannes Film Festival has made another fix to free up movie tickets on its beleaguered online service.

Festival attendees have been complaining for days — even before Cannes officially opened — about the glitchy ticketing website, which takes what feels like an eternity to load and usually ends in an ‘Error’ message, rendering it virtually impossible to secure tickets to both press and premiere screenings.

While problems accessing ticketing sites are nothing particularly new at film festivals, technical hiccups are normally ironed out in the first day or two. In Cannes, however, many delegates have continued to struggle with the website. One senior studio executive told Variety on Wednesday that they’d “all but given up” on the website.

On Thursday afternoon (Day 3), organizers emailed delegates with a new link that has been set up for film market professionals.

The festival said its website issues are “most likely due to malicious acts aimed at saturating the site with requests, thus preventing festival-goers from accessing it.”

Going forward, it’s asking delegates to keep the link private (which is whyVariety has not linked to the new website).

“As we have already been the victims of malicious acts, we ask you not to communicate this link to third parties, especially since it will only work for authorized festival-goers,” said organizers in their email.

The new site marks the second fix from Cannes: On Monday, the festival set up a separate ticketing website for journalists to access screenings. At the time, organizers also blamed the tech issues on “acts aimed at saturating the site with ticket requests.”

The festival has used noticeably stronger language in its email on Thursday, which notes that the acts are “malicious.”

Latest News

Related Articles

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here