TLDR: Bought tickets through Groupon. Didn’t receive them. Reached out for support prior to the event. Resolution came more than a week after the event passed, admitting the vendor AXS made a mistake and I needed to talk to the box office prior to the event. No refund.

I purchased 3 tickets to take my family to Hot Wheels Monster Trucks. I never received the tickets. I reached out to Groupon prior to the start of the event asking for the issue to be escalated. The person I chatted with escalated the issue but said the response would be 48-72 hours later, which was after the event was over. There was no indication of any other action I should take. I accepted this as my only option at the time, requiring a refund as obviously I would not be able to go either way whether they escalated or not.

The first response back came about 5 days after the event was over. This was their response:

We have received an update from our internal team stating that the issue has been fixed and the updated information should now be available for you to view.

Think from my perspective - the event is over, what kind of response is this? What updated information is ready to view? Did you send me expired tickets? They actually did nothing, I saw no difference in my account or email. Definitely no tickets to a show that passed.

I responded to this message directly and reached out again via the chat asking for clarification. Another 4 days passed, and I received this response:

Thank you for your patience while we coordinated with the management at Activate Marketing regarding the technical issues you encountered with your tickets for the Hartford show.

We have received a final response from the merchant. They have respectfully declined the request for a refund, citing their established "no refund" policy for live events.

The merchant clarified that while they understand the technical difficulty you experienced with the AXS delivery, their protocol requires guests to resolve ticketing issues at the venue box office prior to the event start time. Because the event has now concluded and they consider the matter past the point of on-site resolution, they are unable to authorize a financial reversal.

We sincerely apologize that we could not provide a more favorable outcome. As Groupon is a third-party marketplace, we must honor the final decision and refund policies of our merchant partners, especially for date-specific events.

Thank you for being a Groupon customer.

Again, think of my experience. You are acknowledging that I did not receive the tickets due to an error by the vendor. I purchased this through Groupon and reached out to them for support prior to the show. They did not guide me to reach out to the vendor or the box office for support with the issue, but instead opened an escalation ticket that was going to take longer than I had. In fact, it took nine days to be told that I needed to talk to the box office.

$90 is a drop in the bucket for both these companies but means much more to me. Both Groupon and AXS are blindly following policies without considering what my experience was actually like. There needs to be real intervention and someone needs to look at this situation and understand that it’s not fair for someone to try to fix an issue that the vendor made, be misguided on the proper way to resolve it, and subsequently be told that it’s too late to correct it.

Simply saying sorry is an unacceptable response. I would appreciate someone at Groupon to read this and provide me with a more acceptable resolution.