Anyone who wanted to buy wheelchair accessible tickets to Taylor Swift's upcoming Eras Tour stops in Toronto, ON were left out in the cold, says Ajax's Charmaine Tuzi.
The disabled mother was hoping to buy tickets for her daughter's birthday, which falls on one of the six dates Swift will be performing in Toronto this November. However, she says there was no system in place for people with accessibility needs to buy one of the 300 or so designated tickets.
Speaking with CP24, Tuzi calls Ticketmaster's "verified fan" ticket-buying system, which prevents tickets from getting into the hands of scalpers, bots and resellers, makes it "completely inaccessible" for fans with accessibility needs.
The "verified fan" sale requires fans to register for their chance to receive a unique access code that allows fans to buy tickets. Anyone without a code cannot buy tickets directly from Ticketmaster.
"If we're not able to ask for our seats, then those sections appear open and available to all the able-bodied people who got codes," Tuzi tells CP24. "If they are rolling out a code system, then they need to state that if you are requiring tickets, apply for a code here. If you require wheelchair-accessible tickets, apply for a code over here because that keeps us in a smaller pool of people who are knowingly trying to get wheelchair-accessible tickets instead of putting us in a sea of millions that are fighting over seats that we can't even use."
Tuzi normally calls Ticketmaster's accessible hotline to purchase wheelchair-accessible tickets, however, for the Eras Tour agents told her there was nothing they could do to help.
"I called the accessible hotline, and they said, 'We can't issue any tickets without an access code,'" she says. "And I said, 'Okay, well, who's ensuring that disabled people get access codes? Because if you're going to issue codes for seats, you need to issue us codes for our accessible seats.' And Ticketmaster didn't have an answer for this."
Both fan services and the venue box office at Rogers Centre weren't able to help Tuzi either. "They said, 'We have no control over the way the artist decides to sell their seats,'" she says.
Right now, the only way Tuzi and others requiring wheelcheer-accesible seating are able to secure tickets to the six Eras Tour shows is by purchasing from ticket resale brokers like Stubhub or SeatGeek, which allow tickets to be sold for thousands of dollars above face value.
"I need Taylor Swift to know that Ticketmaster and the venue seem to be hiding behind the artist," Tuzi explains. "And all that does is create a convenient dead end to the fan because we can't go and ask the artists to fix it. And if Taylor Swift could fix it, I'm sure she would.
"Music is a vital social outlet for disabled people," she adds. "It's something that we can do. We can join our friends and go to these things as opposed to other activities that might not be accessible, or we might not be physically capable of doing."