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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Jordyn Beazley

Taylor Swift ticket website hit by ‘technical difficulties’ as first Australian presale packages sell out

Taylor Swift performing in Nashville
Tickets for the Australian leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour go on sale this week. Photograph: John Shearer/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

The first pre-sale offering of “VIP packages” for the Australian leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour – available only to American Express cardholders and worth more than $1,000 in some cases – have sold out, hours after they went on sale on Monday.

The Amex ticket site crashed half an hour before some presale packages for the Sydney shows of the February 2024 tour went live for cardholders at 10am on Monday. Melbourne packages were available later in the day and presale and general sale tickets are due to become available later in the week.

Amex began responding to fans on Twitter, who had complained the site had crashed, to direct them to purchase tickets on Ticketek sites which appeared to be managing the web traffic and remained online.

The Amex site was back up and running later on Monday morning, with the company confirming the technical difficulties were the result of high demand. The company would not comment on how many packages were offered on Monday.

Presale tickets for Frontier members will go on sale for the five shows across Melbourne and Sydney from Wednesday, with general ticket sales due to go live on Friday.

The packages available on Monday were being sold for $1,249.60 or $899.90.

Regular tickets for the Australian shows start at $79.90, but a spot in A Reserve will set fans back $379.90.

Swifties had already prepared themselves that the chance to get a ticket was going to be a battle.

Last year, Ticketmaster’s site crashed in the US for Swift’s first tour in five years. Fans reported waiting for up to eight hours in online queues with Ticketmaster tweeting there had been “historically unprecedented demand”.

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