As of around 11:30 a.m. yesterday morning, the official story was still "The Devil Rays are heading to New York and will be there in time for the 1 p.m. first-game which was rescheduled to 3 p.m."
When, after 90 minutes on Metro-North and 15-20 on the subway, we finally arrived at the stadium, it was approximately 2:30, and the announcement over the P.A. was something like this:
As of 12:30, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have not left the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. Thus, there will not be a game starting at 3 p.m. A final decision will be made at approximately 2 p.m.
(yes, it was already 30 minutes past that time).
After consulting with some ticket-gate staff, the end result they told us was "the best-case scenario right now for baseball today is one game starting at 7 p.m."
George and I looked at each other and headed back for the subway. A 1 p.m. game I could do. A 3 p.m. game I could do, grudgingly. But a 7 p.m. game would get me back home exceedingly late compared to when I have to get to bed in order to get to work the next morning.
Meanwhile, though, since they did play the game, I'm anticipating a long drawn-out battle with Ticketmaster towards getting a refund on the tickets. Apparently, you can exchange the tickets for any remaining game this season (except that I don't have any other available weekends this season).
I have this strange feeling I'm going to end up having to pull out the "hole card of business transactions", the credit card chargeback. I think MasterCard will go for the "I paid for a day game, not a night game, so they didn't sell me what I paid for" logic. The credit card company doesn't care, they still get to keep their merchant fees on the transaction, so keeping me happy is pretty much the only thing on their agenda.
I always go right to the credit card company in situations like this for exactly the reasons you mentioned. They don't care, they get paid anyway and unlike the vendor, they are in business to keep your business. Good luck.
Yeah, definitely go for the credit card company. Write to the vendor and give them a chance, if nothing else but to get documentation of your good will, but after that go to your credit bank.
- ask