Is the Visa Canada social media manager okay after that Céline Dion pre-sale?
Getting tickets to Céline’s Paris residency is like getting water from the moon
There were nights when the wind was so cold, and one of those nights was last night, at 4 a.m. Eastern as the Visa Canada pre-sale for Céline Dion’s sure-to-be-stunning Paris residency opened.
The legendary Canadian singer won’t return to the stage until September, after taking time off to focus on her health. But for millions of devout fans, the chaos and mania—or triumph and glory, depending on how you did in the pre-sale—have begun.
As with many major entertainment events that organizers know will attract significant demand, tickets for Dion’s 16 Paris concert dates have gone on-sale in batches. First, there was the lottery-based artist pre-sale, which a reported nine million people signed up for. And then, before Friday’s general public on-sale, Visa cardholders were given a chance to fight for their lives—in French, before sunrise—inside the hellscape that is the ticketing platform Axs. While some happily made it out of those trenches with tickets, let’s just say we hope Visa Canada’s social media person gets to log off early today after fielding hundreds of heated comments.
Related: If you’re hoping to buy World Cup tickets, watch out for scammers
By yesterday evening, Visa Canada’s Instagram page still hadn’t posted the pre-sale information, and fans were set on tracking it down. “It’s 7-freakin-p.m.,” wrote one. “Be serious and give the details.” Another tried a more polite approach, asking, “Can you at least tell us which platform these tickets will be available on, please, so we can prep a teeny bit?”
Another said they felt like they were being trolled, as they approached bedtime unsure whether they should set an alarm or if they even had the right credit card—was the pre-sale for all Visa cardholders, certain Visa cardholders, none? To which website should they go and how much would tickets cost? Questions lingered, and matters became even more confusing when someone at Visa suddenly deleted its pre-sale announcement altogether.
Just when it seemed like hope was truly lost, a nameless though angelic social media manager appeared to soothe the calamity by replying individually to increasingly irate fans, using rosy-cheek and colourful heart and fingers-crossed emojis to accompany specific instructions.
Their helpful vibes and tailored comms were unfortunately no match for the evil that is dynamic pricing, but let’s focus on one revolt at a time.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
