I Am Stepher

As many of you   the few of you that read this may know, I had a pretty bad experience with my last Lady GaGa concert.   I am a huge fan of GaGa and  missed her when she was in St. Louis in 2009.   In a casual conversation with a friend I mentioned that  I had a ton of  frequent flyer miles and Marriott points and had never really used them.  We thought it might be fun to do something  spontaneous so we looked online to see where GaGa was performing in the next month.

We decided on London and booked our flights and hotel right away.  Because our trip was basically free we thought we should splurge on tickets and bought the best seats we could through StubHub.

Our first night in London was perfect.  We had dinner at an amazing restaurant, met some cool people who offered to show us the town and stayed out all night seeing the sites.  The next night was GaGa.  We had to pick our tickets up from a record store that was open until 10.  The concert started at 8 and because GaGa had already been in London for a few days playing shows, we were able to find out that she usually started around 9:30.  We spent the day shopping, having lunch and then came back to the hotel for a nap.  We got ready slowly and decided to get to the record store around 7 to get our tickets.  If only we knew then what we know now.

1) Make sure your train line is  actually running that day

2) It is almost impossible to get a cab in downtown London at 6:00 PM on a Saturday Night

3) If you walk out of your hotel and see that it is raining, don’t skip going back inside to get your umbrella just to save a few minutes.  You might really need it.

On the way to the train station we realized our line was not running that weekend due to repairs. We tried to get a cab for 45 minutes before we finally decided to take the bus.  It was raining and we did not have an umbrella. We were so concerned with missing the opening act but as it turns out, we had bigger things to worry about.

We arrived at the record store at 7:30 and got in line at the cash register.  We told them our names and asked for our tickets and they said “oh, the ticket booth is in the back, and it closed at 7. Sorry.”  WHAT!?!?!  I will keep it short – the girl working the booth took our tickets to sell to her friends  “destroy them”.  We went to the O2 arena anyway to try to scalp tickets but they were sold out and there was nothing we could do.  In the end, we did get to see the last few minutes of the show from a nosebleed section.  We were completely devastated and StubHub did not seem to care.

After a few weeks of negotiation and us threatening to go on the BBC news with our story, StubHub did give us our money back and a credit to buy a new set of tickets when GaGa came back to St. Louis.  After this weekends concert, all is forgiven.  We had the best seats and the best time I could have imagined.