Following this past Saturday's blackout in New York City, StubHub has publicly announced that they'll return more than $500,000 for customers who bought tickets to shows affected by that unfortunate event.
The blackout had an impact upon thousands of customers, which is unsurprising since it took out 30 Manhattan blocks on a Saturday night. In fact, StubHub says that 27 different musical and theater events, stretching from Broadway to Madison Square Garden, were impacted.
Such a (relative) catastrophe was sure to bring about a public explanation. And that's exactly what happened when StubHub's vice president of global customer experience, Daron Fowlks, vocalized the company's policy for such matters in a press release.
“StubHub has our customers’ backs, and in the rare instances where something goes wrong, every ticket is 100 percent guaranteed by our FanProtect Guarantee,” Fowlks said. “Saturday’s blackout in New York City was no exception. As soon as we learned of the events affected, our team kicked into action and alerted customers and provided an update on the situation and processed a full refund for the events that weren’t rescheduled.”
Out of those 27 events, 25 were canceled and likely will not be rescheduled. That reportedly messed up the orders of more than 1,500 StubHub customers. As for the two that have thus far been rescheduled, that'd be a Broadway show with Dave Chappelle (which has now been pushed to Sunday, July 21) and a Jennifer Lopez concert held at Madison Square Garden, which will now be pushed to...today, July 15.
Since MSG is a huge venue it's no real shock that the latter concert left a large number of people disappointed. In fact, 19,000 people had to evacuate when the lights went out. That occurred after Lopez had performed just three songs:
StubHub policy states that they'll let customers know if tickets for those events are still valid. However, when it comes to the Lopez concert, Ticketmaster listed the new date on their site (which is good because it's a quick turnaround) and also said: “Please hold on to your original tickets, as tickets will be honored for the newly rescheduled performance date. Original tickets will not need to be exchanged.”
The show is part of Lopez's It's My Party Tour, which is in celebration of her turning 50 on July 24. She's set to perform in Boston on Tuesday.
As for NYC, power was restored by Sunday morning and an investigation is currently going on to figure out what exactly happened and how to prevent it from happening again.
