This may not be the best part of the forum for this but it didn’t fit any of the ‘tips’ subjects.
Today, March 20th is the start of the new cycle, May 1 to July 31, for purchasing tickets to view The Last Supper-Cenacolo Vinciano-in Milan. Tickets went on sale at 12:00 CET. Unfortunately, that was 4:00am for me, but I got up in plenty of time to log into my vivaticket account. It is a good idea to have this account set up in advance as you will need to have one to do the purchase. And, as someone else advised, have 2 credit cards on hand.
I refreshed my screen a few times and at :56, I was put into a queue for entering the site to make the purchase. I have a feeling this is only done maybe for just this first day-maybe two days-as it is their busiest time. My queue wait time was 22 minutes! A bit scary as there is no indication how the queue is managed. One person at a time, 35 people at a time? No matter in the end I was redirected to the vivaticket site after 25 minutes. It is a bit entertaining to watch the human progress across the page though. There is also an option to have an email sent when it’s your turn to enter the site. I didn’t want to miss by even a second, so I just watched the human walk across the page!
Once you are back on the page to begin the purchase there is not a clear place to begin the process AND you are given 30 minutes to complete the transaction. Finally after scrolling a couple of times through that page, I chose the photo of a hand with a ticket in it even though the info underneath the photo was not current. Good choice. Scroll down to find the calendar, choose your date and time options will pop up. Once you’ve completed that, the info for number of tickets, etc is presented.
I chose my two tickets and since I opted for the 9:30 with a tour, it already included the extra to be paid for that. Check a couple of more boxes and the next page for final confirmation totally threw me off as this is where you are required to enter the names for the tickets. I didn’t recognize the icon of a human head with a red x through it as being where you would enter the information. At this point, I must reiterate the time limit you’re given. I think I had used up 10 of the 30 minutes getting this far. Obvious that I’m not a real whiz!!
Because I had not entered the names, I couldn’t complete the process, so back I went to try to figure out where I needed to do this. I even finger tapped the human head icon a couple of times with no response. Here’s where a mouse or other method than a finger tap might have been more effective. More searching in case I missed a specific place. Meanwhile I had added two additional tickets to my cart. Then I had to get those deleted before I could return to entering names. Tried the finger tap again-success-got our names entered, confirmed and off to their pay site. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it’s only in Italian.
Enter your info. I had to get a confirmation number from my bank. It happens pretty fast but I was seriously running out of time. You are given the choice of payment in euros or payment in your currency ($). Choose euros as the other is dynamic conversion and costs more. It was somewhere around $2.50 extra. I finally completed the entire process with only a few minutes to spare.
I hope anyone who reads this has a much easier time.