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In 2019 I secured a Glastonbury ticket, which has been carried over to this year because of the pandemic. I paid £280 and waited for it to arrive, but it never did.
Unfortunately, the ticket vendor, See Tickets, seems to have sent the ticket as a normal delivery rather than a tracked and signed-for delivery, so its whereabouts remain a mystery.
I visited my local Royal Mail depot and was told my ticket had been delivered, but it could not confirm to which address. Obviously I had no red slip that proved I had missed the delivery to present.
I was told this had happened to many other Glastonbury ticket holders. Glastonbury will not reissue the ticket and has stopped responding to my emails.
I am due to arrive at the festival on Wednesday, but from my research it seems that if I arrive without the ticket I will not be allowed in – even if I can provide proof of payment and an email confirmation.
Every time I email See Tickets I get a response from a different person and I start from the beginning. They ask me to raise the matter with Royal Mail. I respond with the timeline and attachments, but I never hear back.
– EE, London
I have to say I really felt for you. Not only have you been waiting nearly three years to go to Glastonbury, but it is also your birthday this weekend. As it stood, you were going to be stuck at home watching the festival on television while all your friends lived it up at the pyramid stage.
Finding your ticket was going to be akin to finding a needle in a haystack, but somehow I wanted to find a way to get you to the party.
You were told your ticket had been sent by a “secure delivery” method. However, the reality has turned out to be somewhat more precarious. I have established that See Tickets sent out envelopes containing Glastonbury tickets using Royal Mail’s “Special Delivery Guaranteed by 1pm” service, which includes tracking and a requirement for a signature.
However, owing to what Royal Mail suspects was a “human error” – white special delivery stickers were stuck on white paper envelopes, meaning they may have been missed by staff – your tickets were sent to you by normal mail before disappearing for good.
This was far from the “secure” delivery you were promised by See Tickets. Obviously, there is also the possibility that a rogue worker operating within Royal Mail could be behind your ticket’s disappearance, though we have no proof of this.
Although the loss of your ticket was Royal Mail’s failure, your contract was with See Tickets, so it should have been the one to sort it out. I asked See Tickets to help you but, disappointingly, it failed to respond.
Happily though, Glastonbury’s own press office was far more receptive and sympathetic to your plight. Within hours of my call, a replacement ticket had been arranged, which is waiting for you to pick up at the box office when you arrive.
So just like that, your long-awaited Glastonbury trip is saved and you are over the moon. Happy birthday!
A Royal Mail spokesman said: “We are very sorry for the reported non-delivery of this item. Human error occasionally means that items sent via our Special Delivery Guaranteed service are not recognised as such when we process them, and we apologise if that happened on this occasion, as might be the case.”
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