Ticketmaster Logo displayed on a smartphone screen, behind a Live Nation backdrop.
I spent nearly two hours this week trying to convince Ticketmaster to let me spend more money.
If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is.
I’m attending a comedy show this weekend and already had accessible seats. Then I noticed something that seemed like a win. Accessible seats two rows closer became available.
As someone with a visual impairment, those two rows matter.
The only catch was that dynamic pricing had made the closer seats less expensive than the ones I’d originally purchased.
I thought, “No problem. I’ll pay the exchange fee.”
Instead, I spent nearly two hours speaking with customer service, a supervisor, and the Service Resolution Team. Every person I spoke with understood exactly why I wanted to move. Every person was professional, patient, and genuinely tried to find a solution.
None of them could. The system wouldn’t allow it.
As the conversation continued, the irony became harder to ignore. I wasn’t asking for a refund. I wasn’t asking for free tickets. I wasn’t even asking Ticketmaster to lose money. I was asking them to let me pay an exchange fee so I could move to seats that would better accommodate my disability.
The closer seats were cheaper. The system treated that as the problem.
By the end of the second call, I realized something that has stayed with me. The employees understood the problem. The policy couldn’t.
Working in federal public affairs and disability advocacy, I’ve learned most accessibility barriers aren’t created because someone doesn’t care. They’re created because systems are almost always designed around the “normal” use case. Then someone comes along with a perfectly reasonable situation that falls just outside the box, and suddenly everyone can see the problem, but no one has the authority to fix it.
This wasn’t a story about bad customer service. The representatives listened, they empathized, they escalated my case. They stayed with me for nearly two hours. This was a case of genuine people being hamstrung by a policy that couldn’t account for an accessibility need when it happened to intersect with dynamic pricing.
That’s what makes inclusive design so challenging. Accessibility isn’t just about ramps, captions, or accessible seating. Sometimes it’s asking whether our policies, technology, and business rules still work when real people use them in ways we didn’t anticipate.