Tickets to the 2017 Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts go on sale on
Wednesday, May 31, 2017 at 8 a.m. Tickets can be purchased by telephone at 604-885-9631 or 1-800-565-9631 or
online (www.share-there.com/writersfestival). Tickets can be purchased by telephone, online and
in person as of Thursday, June 1, 2017. Our office hours are 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Friday. The office is located at 5511 Shorncliffe Avenue in beautiful downtown Sechelt.
The full schedule of events is
here.
To keep the process moving along, please have your order ready and your credit card and reading glasses in hand.
There is no advantage to using either telephone number (604-885-9631 or 1-800-565-9631). We will have eight telephone lines open. That means we can talk to eight callers at a time. This temporary telephone system has the capacity to keep an additional 16 callers in a waiting queue for up to 20 minutes. That’s 24 callers accounted for. We know that
hundreds of attempts are being made simultaneously. The very frustrating piece is that your call will be dropped if you've been on hold for 20 minutes. I apologize in advance if this happens to you. This is the capacity of the system we have to work with. It is not uncommon to receive automated messages that make no sense at all; i.e. "this number is no longer in service." Again, this is a result of the volume of calls in the first two hours of ticket sales.
There
will be bumps in the first hour but the eight operators are receiving calls and processing orders constantly. Offering online sales last year certainly made a difference and relieved a lot of the pressure. We had great reports from patrons about the online process offered by www.share-there.com.
Online sales are subject to processing fees of 9.6% (5% to share-there.com who have built a secure site for ticket sales and 4.6% to PayPal). All prices include GST.
Please call the office
after June 21 if you would like your tickets mailed to you.
We encourage you to let us hold onto your tickets for you. Postage is expensive and having tickets held here eliminates the possibility of them being lost or forgotten. We will hold your tickets until you come for your first event at the Festival. You will receive a confirmation from share-there when you order online but you still need a ticket printed by the Festival of the Written Arts to attend an event. Why? Our tickets consume less paper and we are not ready to scan digital images on phones and tablets.
All tickets will be ready for pick-up on
Wednesday, June 21.
We would really like to hear from you if you have special seating needs. Please call back in June or July to discuss that. We won't have time to help you on the first day of sales and we don't want your request to get lost.
Please call or send me an email if you have questions or concerns. We look forward to chatting with you in the weeks to come as we prepare to celebrate the 35th Anniversary of this wonderful gathering of writers and readers!
Please note: the following event on Sunday, June 25 is FREE! It requires no tickets at all! We hope you will join us at
WordPlay in the Park, our 35th Anniversary gift to the community that we're so proud to call home.
