I called my local cinema yesterday (part of a major chain) to book tickets for a show that night. Up until now when you called to book tickets the phone was answered by a person who quickly took my booking and I could then collect my tickets from a machine in the cinema foyer.
Not anymore…
Now they have a voice activated system. I talk to machine and the machine recognises what I am saying – at least that’s the theory. As anybody that has used speech recognition software can tell you it’s a bit hit and miss so I was impressed when it recognised the name of my cinema; however that was the last thing it recognised. I tried several times and then gave up, my wife then tried assuming that my highly irritated tone of voice was affecting it but it couldn’t recognise what she was saying either.
To make things worse there was no way to just get through to an operator without using this cursed system. End result we couldn’t book tickets.
To add insult to injury the phone number is now a premium rate phone number so it probably cost me an unreasonable amount to NOT book tickets for a film.
Why have they done this? Well one has to assume to remove the cost of a person answering the phone. Surely they can’t be So cash strapped that one head per cinema will break them? I doubt it. It’s just to screw the last penny out of customers to HELL with any semblance of good service.
It’s now impossible for me to book tickets in advance; which makes it much less likely that I will go to the cinema especially after having turned up to watch Kill Bill only to find they had taken it off 2 days early.
I will be complaining to the cinema chain – assuming their is an address on their website of course…