Ticket stands in restaurants

[Kate]

When we went to Florida in November 2010 we bougt some tickets from the booth in the ponderosa for Disney, what hadnt even occurred to me until we bought them was that they had previously belonged to someone else and you could be refused entry to the parks, which i suppose it a bit like fraud?
Anyway, if you arent allowed or supposed to but tickets from these people, how come they are still allowed to run and havent been shut down? They arent just in restaurants, they are also dotted about international drive.

For the record, i would NEVER buy from them again, it was much more hassle than it was worth

[Keith]

Well sometimes you can have a situation where a company like Disney says it won't honour pre-used tickets but there's no law in place to prevent selling them. So they can't necessarily shut the places down all they can do is tell people that if they detect you using them you wont be allowed in

I definitely wouldnt ever use them though I agree with you

[DisneyFreak]

Not worth the risk vs. savings IMO.

[chief]

my goodness you have to be very careful. what a shame you had a bad experience i wonder how many others out there fall for these! im afraid there are no cheap park tickets! disney are expensive but really if you think it is good value, if you visit all four parks at least 2 times compared to 1 day at alton towers.

[Kate]

Well tbh the tickets themselves were no trouble at all. When we bought and paid for them and the woman sat there rubbing off the signature with a cotton wool bud - well thats when alarm bells started ringing, very stupidly up to that point we didnt realise that they werent ligitimate! It made us all incredibly nervous heading to the parks. What happened after was the bad bit, we all felt quite threatened by their behaviour

[Tink]

Actually, it's one of the great mysteries... it is illegal to sell tickets for reuse. Why it isn't enforced is beyond me.

Never, ever buy tickets from other than an official source. Disney can (and does!) confiscate the tickets and you can easily be out the money you paid for them, and no way into the park (without buying new tickets from Disney).

It is not unusual at all for those tickets to not work.

[Keith]

What happened after was the bad bit, we all felt quite threatened by their behaviour

eek??? sounds really bad :/ what happened?

interesting if it's actually illegal rather than just "not allowed" you really would have thought they'd close them down to protect visitors as well.

The first time we went to Orlando we asked the taxi driver to drop us off at somewhere nice to eat and they took us to the ponderosa opposite erm erm erm some large hotel which I can't remember :/ noticed in May that the ponderosa had closed down.

Anyway, we had to walk through the ticket selling place to get there and wow did they do the hard sell. Really seemed like they weren't going to let us past until we bought tickets from them at one point.

I had no idea at that point that they were used tickets, I just thought they may be more expensive than at disney or perhaps even fakes.

We eventually had our ponderosa meal and went back to the hotel to buy our tickets at the front desk and there was a large multi family party at the desk explaining how they'd bought tickets earlier in the day and been turned away at the parks because all the days had been used on them.

[Kate]

Was it the ponderosa on international drive keith? the kiosk thingy was in a big shop?

The woman on there was very clever, she got information out of us just through general chat, we had no idea that it was all being stored so she could contact us. She seemed nice enough at the time - friendly. Anyway, we did the 2 days (MK & DHS, while the lady was "chatting" we had told her which parks we were doing and what days we were doing them) and the following day my brother had a phone call from her saying she wanted the tickets back - now, when we bought them she had not mentioned us giving them back to her. She told him he HAD to bring them back because she was had other customers waiting for them. My brother told her that as far as he was concerned we had bought the tickets and they belonged to us, we hadnt signed anything or agreed to take them back - and as it happened we had other plans that day and taking the tickets back werent one of them. She then got really snotty (to put it politely) with my brother and said that she was sending her son to our hotel to collect them. In the meantime, one of her sons rang me in the hotel room and got snotty with me, i told him that it was never mentioned that we had to take the tickets back - if we had agreed to do that then it wouldve been no problem. His tone of voice changed completely - and he was on his way down to collect them in our hotel. I have to say, his tone of voice and his manner frightened me, ive never felt threatened before up til that time so goodness knows how it feels to have someone really after you!
I spoke to my brother and we agreed to take the tickets down to the ponderosa when we were ready that day, we had planned to go down there for breakfast anyway so it wasnt a big deal to go in after. My brother, my husband and myself all told her what we thought of her "business" and how it made us all feel. Nothing was ever said about us taking the tickets back, and to make us all feel the way she did was not on at all.

The way we were treated and the risks are just not worth it at all, i wouldnt do it again. Although, she did end up giving us back $50 each per ticket as a "good will gesture" so i suppose we didnt do too badly!

[MrGrumpy]

thats really bad, how do you tell the good places from the bad then?

[Kate]

I dont think there are any good stands tbh. None of them seem to be brand new tickets