Concert seat blunder leaves ticket-holding patrons without seats

TAMPA - Imagine buying tickets for a concert and then when you get to the concert you find out your seat is not there.  Literally not there.

That's exactly what happened to Steven Sherman and six of his friends at Friday night's sold-out Elton John concert.

"It was a disaster.  I mean, it really was a mess," says Sherman.  "Very, very irritated and robbed.  When we got to our seats, we realized that two of our seats didn't even exist in the seating chart"

He says somehow, tickets were sold for seats that weren't there.  Seats that were eliminated during the $35 million renovation project the Sundome recently underwent.  The concert was to serve as the grand opening to celebrate the new face of the venue, but for Sherman, who purchased eight tickets at $168 a ticket, his experience was nothing short of disappointing.

We had had tickets for over two months, a lot of planning went into it, for all of us to get together to do this and it doesn't come around all the time.  Elton John doesn't come to Tampa every two years."

Sherman says the view from the balcony in which he and his friends were moved to was not nearly as good as the view they would have had.  But according to Trent Merritt with the USF Sundome, that wasn't the case for most of the people who had to be relocated.

"Most people we had to move got even better seats than they had before," says Merritt.

Merritt adds that his office is diligently working on a case by case basis to make this right for those concert goers that were affected.  He does mention though, some of those that had an issue purchased their tickets from scalpers.  That said, there is no guarantee those tickets were going to be right to begin with.  

Sherman says he was offered a refund for the two seats that weren't available, but he says at this point, the only thing that would really make this botched experience right, would be to refund him for all eight seats; considering the missing two seats forced everyone in his party to move elsewhere.