Adventures with wanting to grab a movie
So, its the 30th of December here. But that’s no excuse for the dismal service that Tanjong Golden Village Cinemas (running Microsoft IIS nonetheless) has to provide. Meet the Fockers is premiering in Malaysia today, so the natural thing to do is to go watch it. So, here comes my tale of trying to book two tickets…
To make an online booking, I need to sign-up at the website. Except they ask for some ridiculous personal information, like your Identity Card/Passport number – why?. I don’t like giving away this information, especially over HTTP, but I comply. After the signing up, I quickly hop on into their ETicketing service (UI Improvement: when clicking on showtimes -> and “book now” for a movie of your choice, it takes you to the e-ticketing feature, but I still have to manually choose everything again (I’d expect the movie to be pre-selected for me already)). I choose my cinema, the movie, and the time, and enter a value for tickets to be purchased, all of which work really well. Then it contacts the cinema, or tries in vain to do so, and when its done after over a minute, it complains that I lack the Java VM, and I can’t get tickets allocated.
I install the JRE, link it correctly, restart the browser, and attempt to do this again. Now, the server is non-responsive – i.e. it says it can’t process the request. I also get the occasional IIS error page, which stupidly sends me to a page at Microsoft to resolve my error. (UI Improvement: Better error messages, rather than going to the IIS administrator page would make more sense – customise the 404).
Now I call the number that’s listed at the website. Go thru the menu, and what error do I get? One that says their system is down, so contacting the cinema directly would be my next best option. So I take the number down, and try dialling it repeatedly, to no avail. At the same time, I’m trying to get the e-ticketing stuff to work.
I finally get lucky, and it allocates my two tickets. I can’t choose my seat allocation, it seems broken (and now, I have the JRE mind you), so I get auto-allocated to the fifth row from the screen. Semi-happy that it worked, I take down the booking number, and agree to pay the extra RM1 premium for online booking. (UI Improvement: I don’t want to re-enter my mobile phone number, and other random information thats already in my user profile – mine the data for me, so it saves me typing, thanks.)
Contrast this with my experience with trying to do this in Australia. I booked my seats at about 2.45am on the day the show was playing (TGV closes at 1am), paid for it all via card, and just hopped over to the cinema on the day itself and got the machine to spit my ticket out when my card was inserted. Never had to see a human, at all. Didn’t waste time from 10.49am right up to 11.26am.
I don’t mind paying a premium for convenience. But when a cinema doesn’t value my time, and makes me waste over half an hour just to get a ticket, it seems rather silly. Well, its either that or battling queues that might take you just as long, and you’ll probably not get a movie on time either. And I paid full price today as well, no discounts, whatsoever.
