[Scott Gavin] Saturday, August 23, 2008 5:22:01 PM
After the Auckland , New Zealand show was cancelled I decided my wife and I were literally going to go for broke [ or is that go broke!] and fly to Sydney to see Priest. I used our ticket refunds to get the tickets, much the same dollar value. Had to save up for a few weeks to afford the airfare/hotel package, in that time the package went up in value by $700.00! Obviously this is because the further out you book the cheaper it is, and we're now left catching a 7:00am flight which means we have to get up at like 3:30am. To top it all off, I just checked the ticketek website to see if any of the Australian gigs were sold out [ or cancelled], to find that all tickets for the Sydney show are now AUS$60.00! Nice, thats less than half price, in fact I could have bought both my wife and I's tickets for $29.00 less than the price of one! None of this is Priest or their managements fault, merely the economics of trying to fill venues that are too large for the band, big enough for the stage, but vastly over-ambitious in terms of ticket sales. I'm sure this is why the Auckland gig was cancelled early on as they had probably only sold say 1500 tickets and needed say 4000/5000 to break even by a certain date out from the gig.. I'm not really complaining, you can't put a dollar value on this experience, but to have lost nearly a grand on the deal so far, they better not cancel the gig, as usual all my arrangements bar the actual tickets, are non-refundable. That said, we're still going to be staying at the Langham hotel in Auckland on the 7th, the night Priest were supposed to play Auckland. All digits still crossed for Sydney. 19 sleeps to go!
