I Wasn’t Drawn in The Ballot

Hello, here is some information about the Ticket System.

The ticketing system has been designed and implemented with as much fairness as possible. There are four bites at the cherry, using different methods, at different times. Speed of internet is not a factor. How long you’ve been going is a factor in two of the four allocations. New people are welcome. It’s as fair as it can be, when there are way more people than there are tickets.

Firstly, the majority of people in the Ballot are not drawn in either round. Not being drawn does NOT mean you can’t go to Meredith – in fact the number of people at Meredith every year who are not drawn is greater than the number that are.

The Ballot is just the first allocation of tickets. After the two rounds of the Ballot there are Store Sales, then Online Sales, then lastly there’s Aunty’s Last Chance which is based as far as possible ‘on merit’ and looks after those subscribed longest, first.

The number of people whose names are drawn in the Ballot equals only about a third of the total people who actually get tickets in the Ballot: each Ballot winner can purchase three tickets. Most people who win the Ballot have friends also in the Ballot and can look after them with their ‘second’ and ‘third’ ticket. So the Ballot ‘looks after’ three times more people than just the ‘Ballot winners’ – in practise there are three times more ‘Ballot winners’ than it seems at first. If we instead only allowed one ticket purchase per ballot winner, there would be three times as many winners. However that is not a practical solution; it would split up couples etc and would mean extra booking and postage fees for every single purchaser.

The actual Ballot selection process is indeed random. But the length of time someone has been subscribed is taken into consideration. The First Round is only for existing subscribers, and though it doesn’t guarantee anybody tickets – nobody was ever guaranteed tickets to Meredith in the entire 20 years – it does favour those that have been with the festival longest.

Within that first round draw, the year in which a subscriber subscribed is taken into account. So people who subscribed in 2003 may have, say, a 1 in 2 chance of being drawn, whereas a person who subscribed in 2009 would have longer odds. Sometimes anomalies happen whereby longer-term subscribers don’t score and newer ones do. That is the nature of being random, it favours the longer-term subscribers but it’s not an absolute. We are considering a ‘four strikes and you’re in’ mechanism whereby if you are a long-term sub and haven’t won, say three ballots in a row then you get auto-selected in the 4th. Problem is, there’s too many people in this boat. That’s why we have Aunty’s Last Chance at the end to look after those poor long-subscribed souls who went thru the system joy-less. If you are a longterm subscriber and have recently changed your email address, please read this – as it’s important that we maintain your history.

Let me know if you’d like further explanation.

I fully realise not being drawn in the Ballot – even though it’s random – seems like a rejection, but please don’t take it personally. For what it’s worth, issuing ‘sorry you didn’t win the ballot’ emails is the worst task of my whole year and I dread that August day for months.

The ticketing system has been designed and implemented with as much fairness as possible. There are four bites at the cherry, using different methods, at different times. Speed of internet is not a factor. How long you’ve been going is a factor. New people are welcome. It’s as fair as it can be, when there are way more people than there are tickets.

For more details about each aspect of the system please click here.

Sincerely,

Aunty Meredith

back to Ticket Info