I just had a pretty lousy experience at the movie theater that did not need to be bad. If this had been my first experience at the Alamo Drafthouse, I would not come back. The reality is that a number of bad decisions collided to ruin the evening for me and many others.
It all started with an email from GoFobo . This is a company that does movie screenings. My previous experience was not that great. I thought that Alamo could make it OK. The email promised two tickets to Undone. I clicked on the link to find their server was down. Strike one. Out of curiosity, I checked the link again a couple ours later. To my surprise, it worked and I was able to get two tickets. I shared the link with a buddy who also scored two tickets. This is where the first failing started.
The reason for doing a free screening is to help build buzz about a new movie or, in this case, TV show. Sometimes they will ask you to fill out a survey and sometimes you get a chance to meet someone from the cast or crew. The problem is that it’s free. People who get free tickets, may or not show up. So they give out more tickets than they have seats. This forces everyone to have to show up early.
The showtime was at 8. My plan was to show up about 6:30, have a nice drink and dinner upstairs, then see the show. I recommend this at Alamo. They have great bartenders and you can see what you are eating. That plan was thrown out the window when I saw the line down the hall and around the corner. We got in line. Surely they will let us in an hour before the showing so we can order food and drink inside. We waited. Fifteen minutes later they came buy and gave us tickets — assigned seats. Cool. Now no reason to wait in line.
We went up stairs to the restaurant to order food. It’s now 7:20. The waitress discouraged us from ordering food because it would take 20 minutes for the food to make it up there and besides, the theater would be opening up in ten minutes. We just got a drink. Ten minutes later we walked back downstairs expecting to be able to go into the theatre. Nope. The line was still there. We waited at the back of the line another fifteen minutes before they let us into the theater.
Now it’s just ten minutes to show time. They’ve put boxes of popcorn on some of the tables. Not ours. The servers flit like hummingbirds but then totally disappear. Showtime. Another 15 minutes passes. Mind you, we don’t really know how long the show will be. Undone is a 30 minute TV show. I assume we are going to see more than one episode and there’s supposed to be a Q&A at the end. Normally, the servers swarm you as you come in so that all the orders are in a half hour before showtime. We haven’t placed our order yet.
The show starts. I wrote our order as clear as possibly on the white paper so that I could watch the show and not have to interact with the server. My order had 6 items. Two entree, two appetizers, and two drinks. I know my handwriting was legible because everything was correct on the bill but we only got ⅔ of the order. I had to send the bill back for correction and my date didn’t get a drink or entree.
Show is over. I just want to go home. Where’s the server? They are still trying to serve food. It took 30 more minutes to get my credit card charged so I could leave. Yes, I still tipped the server 20% of the corrected bill. I did not see the failing localized with him. I call upon Alamo to do better as I know Alamo can do.
One of things I noticed was that Alamo was selling the same tickets that we were getting for free. I think this was the reason that we had to wait in line until a certain time. We were there not as the primary audience but to fill the balance of the seats. We ended up in the second row which was just a bit too close for comfort. The next time I see “free” tickets to a preview, I will look to see if I can just buy seats and not risk driving to Dallas to find all the seats gone.
I think the solution would have been to use the Alamo ticket system give people seats as they came in using the GoFobo ticket as payment. This means that they would loose a little potential revenue but Alamo could have easily made that up by inviting us to wait an hour upstairs at the bar. Even better would have been to let us choose our seat online but that would not solve the no-show problem. This solution would have also allowed for people to more naturally go down into the theater instead of everyone cramming in all at once.
The service problem was compounded by the day of the week. I assume that a normal Monday would not have this many food orders. I only saw four servers running the whole theater. Our order was not even taken until about fifteen minutes after the show had started. Twenty minutes later, food started to come out but we are well into the middle act of this three-ring circus. Some food never came out. Several people around me ordered pizza that came out after the show and Q&A.
So over all a rough experience. Definitely not what I expect from Alamo. I’ll be back but not for a “free” screening. Please Alamo, you can make the experience better.
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