SEPTA plans to sell special three-day transit passes for the papal visit, but not until after it solves technical issues that crashed sales of Regional Rail tickets.
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SEPTA officials held a press conference at their headquarters in center city Philadelphia Tuesday to announce an online lottery which will be held for Papal Visit Regional Rail Passes.
Given that only 175,000 passes are available for each day of the papal visit on September 26 and September 27, and given that SEPTA’s failed site had about 54,000 visitors within the first minute of launch, the demand for passes far exceeds the number available. Each person selected in the lottery will be able to buy 10 tickets for each day. Yesterday SEPTA said it was still working on the fix for the problems.
SEPTA quickly suspended its online sale of special Regional Rail passes for the Pope’s visit saying the site has a glitch after experiencing more traffic than anticipated. Only about 200 transactions were completed.
“We want to get these papal passes into people’s hands so they can make serious decisions about their papal plans”, Williams said.
The web service that is hosting the lottery site, Ticketleap, has mechanisms in place to detect potential scalpers or ticket brokers from monopolizing the supply of passes.
The transit agency announced Tuesday its solution on how to sell special train passes to see to Pope Francis.
“Customers who make multiple submissions could have their entries voided”. They are the only stations that will be open during the weekend. The Wilmington-Newark Line will be making stops at Wilmington and Marcus Hook stations while traveling inbound to 30th Street Station.
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“They’ve done the math and figured out exactly what our capacity is”, she said. A $1.95 handling fee will still be applied and processing takes between two to three weeks.
