The Rod Stewart concert at the Mission is set to be a sell-out with only "a few" general admission tickets and about 100 reserved seats left this morning after Saturday's online concert club sales.
Concert promoter Sports and Entertainment Ltd (SEL) had set aside a quantity of general sales, which got
under way this morning, but were taken by surprise at the response from club members.
SEL's director of operations Garry Craft said he would be on the phone today "breaking the news" to the ticketing agency that they had to do some ticket shuffling as the demand from club members was so high. "We had more than 6000 people on the website well before noon on Saturday - just waiting," Mr Craft said.
"It was quite extraordinary and at one stage they were selling faster than they did for his first concert here."
At the peak of the sales, the multiple waiting lists had up to 600 people queued up.
He said checks showed that all concert club members applying for tickets had been looked after but if any had missed out they were advised to make contact through the club website.
"We pretty much took care of everyone," he said, adding there was no doubt all 25,000 tickets would be snapped up.
There were no queues at the Napier Ticketek outlet this morning, with sales expected to be made online.
"I suppose it was no real surprise there was an extraordinary response," Mr Craft said, although he added that staging the same act seven years later had been an unknown in terms of public reaction.
"But he was so good and people told us they wanted to see him again - and Rod himself wanted to come back. He loved it so much here."
On the hospitality front, SEL was still in the process of working through licensing details with local authorities, although was not expecting any leeway on the BYO issue which saw a ban on drinks being taken into last February's concert.
Mr Craft was hoping, however, for some leeway on drink allocations, given the size of the crowd involved. Long queues and delays at the last concert were being addressed through plans to effectively double the outlet capacity on site, he said.
