I wanted to blog for the record what a disgrace the Atlantic City Hilton is. I'm not even sure blogging is sufficient, and I urge the authorities in New Jersey to further investigate the Hilton's ticket policies, which violate the spirit, if not also the letter, of state consumer protection laws.
As I earlier wrote, I attended two Huey Lewis and the News concerts at the Hilton last month. I've seen the band there before, and on those earlier occasions the Hilton had proven nearly impossible to deal with. But on this occasion it topped itself.
At best it demonstrated abject incompetence. For instance, shortly after the band confirmed publicly that these shows over the Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend would take place, I and other fans called the Hilton to inquire when tickets would go on sale.
"They're not playing here," we were told. Of course, the Hilton had done this on previous occasions, wrongly denying that the band would be playing there on its legitimately scheduled dates. So I wasn't inclined to take this denial too seriously. After fruitlessly debating with them that the band would, in fact, be playing there, I changed tactics. "Fine," I said, "Hypothetically speaking, if the band were playing Memorial Day weekend, when would tickets go on sale?" Six weeks before the show was the response, which would put the on-sale date at mid-April. We had this conversation in early March.
Less than two weeks later, the tickets went on sale.
But that was fine. Annoying, but fine. It's the Hilton's behavior subsequently that pushes the boundaries of the law.
The Hilton's theater is one large, rectangular room. Impermanent seats are arranged with three center sections in front of the stage, angled sections on each side, and a dividing corridor separating all that from further blocks of seats to the rear. In the past the Hilton has sold reserved seats within that configuration. There was, of course, the one occasion where after having started to sell reserved seats it then tried to retroactively declare that the seats would be general admission, but I believe the band may have interceded and the reserved seats were in fact honored. (However, I'm sure there were people adversely affected by the switch, as at least some had now purchased the wrong tickets while the Hilton kept changing its mind.)
This time they sold all the tickets as general admission seats from the outset. There were no reserved seats. There also were no "tiers" of seats, with different prices for different sections. Instead it appeared - noting in particular the seating chart on the Ticketmaster website - that the whole auditorium was up for grabs, and at $55 per seat. I bought a few for the Saturday show, but held off a bit before getting the Sunday ones. It's a fairly large room so I wasn't worried it would sell out too quickly. And it didn't. As of late April it still had tickets. And I went to buy one. But now, instead of $55, they cost $75, for the exact same ticket. No new seating tiers, no better location - the exact same thing.
Moreover, even though they were now selling the tickets for $75, they were still advertising them for $55 on both the Ticketmaster and the Hilton websites (screenshot of Hilton website from 4/20/07; screenshot of the Ticketmaster page listing tickets at $55 yet selling them for $75). Ticketmaster, after several wasted hours of telephoning, adamantly refused to honor the lower, advertised price. In the end, the Hilton actually did - for me and only for me, and only because I called my way up the phone tree to the director of customer service and phrased it as a customer service issue. But it still took hours and hours on the phone with them to get them to make good on the price, and the director of customer service still refused to fix it for all the other customers who were similarly situated as victims of the Hilton's bait and switch.
And the Hilton wasn't done with us yet. The venue was general admission. General admission shows can be a double-edged sword for a fan. Whereas with a reserved seat you know exactly where you'll be, and you only need to show up in time for the curtain, on the other hand your seat is not likely to be all that great. However, with general admission you can often get the best seat in the house - but you have to work for it, by getting to the venue in time to be on the front of the line.
That's the way it's usually done, and explicit conversations with the Hilton about "how do I get up front" resulted in the expected standard instruction that I should be first on line. So I was, both nights, having gotten there more than three hours before showtime each night. And yet, even though I was the first person through the doors, the Hilton refused to seat me any closer than the back half of the theater the first night, and only put me in the front spot of a side section the second night because I wouldn't stop arguing with them.
Meanwhile, it was one lie after another from the venue's representatives - the ushers and maitre d's. "Those seats," one usher said, pointing to all the ones in the section fronting the stage, "are all reserved seats." Which was a lie, because reserved seats were never sold. "We'll come back and move you if anything's still open," was another recurrent lie. In fact, the only bit of honesty that emerged from any representative's lips came from the one condescending usher who said, "Everything the Hilton tells you is a lie." Then he added, "If you don't like it, you should hire a lawyer and sue."
I'm writing this post because I want to take his advice. Except I don't want to sue. I don't have enough in my own personal damages to justify the effort. But I call upon the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey to make a full investigation. New Jersey has some very tight consumer protection laws with regard to ticket sales, mostly in regard to scalping. But it's not just scalpers who take advantage of consumers; promoters can too, and from time to time the state has investigated behavior by promoters for acting in ways counter to consumer's interests, particularly in situations
In this case:
- The Hilton held back three large blocks of its best seats for "high rollers" of indeterminate and unadvertised origin.
- It did so with no indication to the consumer that the ticket they purchased would be limited to certain areas of the theater.
- In fact, the Hilton explicitly represented that the tickets would be valid for anywhere in the theater, as long as you got there early enough.
- Furthermore, the Hilton box office agents at no time indicated that additional hidden fees were required to secure better seats (read: tipping the ushers, which apparently was the unspoken quid pro quo even though the Hilton expressly refused, despite direct questioning on the subject, to acknowledge to this "custom" to its customers in advance).
All of these tactics are completely inappropriate under the law. Consumers have the right to receive the benefit of their bargains, but with the Hilton they do not. And it's not just me who has been affected by the Hilton's bad behavior. Hundreds of fans were affected each night, and hundreds more are affected every night that the Hilton holds another performance with similar ticketing policies, which I suspect is quite often, often enough to make the number of affected consumers reach well into the thousands. Most of these people probably don't have the educational background or inclination to effectively stand up to the Hilton. And why should they have to? A concert is entertainment, a respite. It shouldn't have to be work to ensure that you aren't being taken advantage of. That's what we have laws, to ensure that won't happen. As it was, even for me, it still took hours and hours to not be completely abused by the Hilton, yet at the end I was still unable to make them act consistently with their advertising.
Furthermore, the Hilton, as an Atlantic City casino, is greatly dependent on the goodwill of the people of New Jersey, who let it do what it does. It's a highly regulated business, and the regulators need to know when it is acting contrary to the public's interest. So when, for instance, the Hilton asks the state for a favor (e.g., permission to expand its facilities) the state is in a better position to decide whether it's in the public's interest to accommodate it. At this point the answer clearly is no.
Because not only is all of the above true of the Hilton, but another fact to note is that at no time was sales tax collected on any of these tickets (neither the ones purchased through Ticketmaster nor the ones purchased at the on-site box office), nor was there any mention that the tax was included in the total price. So unless the Hilton is on its own defying standard convention and quietly treating the 13% sales tax plus Atlantic City luxury tax it's supposed to charge on each ticket as something akin to a value-added tax built into the cost of the ticket that they dutifully pass along to the state as required (which seems unlikely given the Hilton's predilection to make a buck wherever it can, since it could easily pass along this charge to its customers as long as it disclosed it) then the Hilton is also a tax cheat and should be prosecuted as such.