Tickets for the Sunday event of the 29th Concurs de Castells de Tarragona ─due on the 6th of October at the Tarraco Plaça Arena from 10am─ sold out in just over 40 minutes, while those for the Saturday event, due on the 5th of October, are still available at https://concurscastells.tarragona.cat. The ticket sale was done online and users were allowed 4 tickets each.
The sale procedure, which was meant to start at 10am, was put on hold for 20 minutes due to an error in the configuration of the platform’s queuing system. The person in charge from Koobin ─the company that was awarded the online ticket sale procedure─, Fernando Martín, said that “this time, we wanted to change things a bit, but the new queuing system didn’t work well, because there was an error in the redirecting of the sale platform”. Martín also said that “when we realised about this, we did our best to solve it, but the way the correction was spread was random and not to every user at once”. Martín from Koobin spoke for the press to “apologize to the casteller world, the Concurs de Castells and the Ajuntament de Tarragona. In the last edition, we did everything right and, this time, we thought we had a better method, which has not been the case. It’s been our fault”. Martín also stated Koobin will not charge Ajuntament de Tarragona for their services.
On the other hand, the councillor of Culture and Festivities, Sandra Ramos, said: “We know what happened today is very serious, because the ticketing for the Concurs de Castells generates a lot of excitement and many people were left with nothing”. Ramos also said that “the direction of the Concurs is now working internally to see what happened and decisions will be made, if necessary. Still”, said, “I would like to make very clear this has been a technical mistake by the company we hired for the ticket sale process”.
Once the service was restored, the sale process continued successfully and, at 10.40am, all 4.880 tickets for the Sunday event were sold, to which we should include the 760 given to the colles. As for the Saturday event, due on the 6th of October, at 2pm, 2.111 of the 4.003 tickets available were sold.
Regarding the origin of purchasers, Tarragona was city with the highest number of users that purchased tickets for both events (528), followed by Vilafranca del Penedès (225), Barcelona (212), Valls (65), Reus (39), El Vendrell (32), Sant Cugat del Vallès (28), Torredembarra (25), El Catllar (20) and Cambrils (18), in the top 10. All users purchased 4 tickets each. The remaining tickets were sold by users from other towns.
Tickets for the Saturday event are 6€ and those for the Sunday event are 15€ on the first floor (seat included) and 12€ on the second floor (no seat included). The event due in Torredembarra on the 29th of September is free of charge.
