When is the cup scheme not the cup scheme?

Hot on the heels of WHUST publishing an article about the club’s poor communication over ticketing, the club did it again. Season ticket holders who had joined the home cup scheme received a text message after 6pm on Monday 11 December 2023, warning:

“Your priority Home Cup Scheme window for our upcoming FA Cup third round fixture against Bristol City on Sunday 7 January will open tomorrow at 10am. Secure your seat here.”

Members of the European cup scheme had been told back in October that they had to buy their tickets too. This turned out to be inaccurate – the European cup scheme members were simply allocated their season ticket seat for those matches and had the money deducted. Most assumed the latest missive from the club must be similarly wrong, too.

Several on X (formerly Twitter) raised the issue, with most comments suggesting the club had got it wrong and nobody needed to do anything. But WHUST board members sought clarity. We wrote at 8am on 12 December asking for an answer before the alleged 10am window opened.

Ticketing boss Nicola Keye replied before 9am making clear cup scheme members did have to manually buy these tickets – because not everyone would be able to get their usual seat.

“You do need to purchase your ticket for this game. It is due to Bristol City taking their full allocation of 9k tickets, resulting in several thousand supporters needing to relocate for the game,” she wrote.

WHUST tweeted this information and replied to threads discussing it and posted on Facebook, but we also notified fellow ISC member fan bodies and urged them to notify as many of their supporters as they could too.

The club issued more details on its website just before 10am explaining that the cup scheme members had priority, even over Bondholders. And it sent an email out explaining the situation at 11.30.

Crucially, supporters on the home cup scheme wishing to secure the additional Loyalty Point must purchase their ticket before 12pm on Thursday 14 December. So, if you haven’t already done so, buy your ticket soon.

How can ticketing get is communications so badly wrong so often? WHUST has repeated its offer to be crash test dummies for ticketing communications, to read drafts in advance and try to flag up errors or suggest improvements. We first offered this as a free bit of help back in August 2022. We believe we can help the club communicate better.

But it seems the would rather come across as incompetent than accept help from fans.