It’s not a feature, it’s a bug Hrush
This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about Bookmyshow.com. A lot of us at Cleartrip are big, big fans of the site and the service. And it’s because we love the site so much that we’re going to point out one small gripe we have with it.
A few weeks ago, four of us wanted to go watch Inception, so we turned to Bookmyshow.com as we always do and we picked a show time at Sterling theatre. While trying to select our seats, I was repeatedly confronted with an error message:
You cannot leave a single seat between your order and the aisle or wall. Please select again.
As you can see, this was a problem–the first four rows in the Gold section of the theatre (rows G through H) have a total of 20 seats per row, arranged in four different blocks of five seats each.
It was impossible for us to sit in the first row (G) because no matter how we selected, the irritating error message stood resolutely in our way. We had three choices:
- Sit separately
- Sit in one of the rows further back (with the added benefit of reduced legroom)
- Book an extra seat and get it done with
We chose the third option and paid for a seat–knowing full well that we were throwing money away to circumvent a ‘feature’ that Bookmyshow.com implemented.
In product design, there are always tradeoffs and there are always arguments amongst the various teams involved about whether something is a ‘feature’ or a ‘bug’ (the techies usually like to insist that every quirk in the product is actually a very useful feature and will come in handy that one time every 30,000 years that the earth lies in the shadow of Jupiter’s ninth moon).
I have no doubt that the Bookmyshow team implemented this ‘feature’ in order to prevent theatre owners from being stuck with single seats that they wouldn’t be able to sell. But in this case, it is forcing customers to either throw away money or to sit in seats that are not their first preference.
When we debate these tradeoffs at Cleartrip, we usually have a simple way of settling the argument–we ask ourselves, “Well, what’s the best thing to do here for the customer?” We’ve found that having a simple and consistent approach to this saves us a lot of time and is a huge help in decision-making.
Looking at this ‘feature’ through that lens, we can safely say: It’s not a feature, it’s a bug.
Hi,
I also faced the same issue while booking for 4 seats for the show of 'Once upon a time in Mumbai'. It is very irritating. Must be addressed for the benefit of the online customer as BookMyShow also charges convenience fee.
Interesting, but this couldn't be argued as a feature as the ratio of lost customers (due to this bug) to lost single seats would be high.
There would be lot of combinations and instances where seats required would be just 1 less than the free ones in any preferred row for a customer. I am sure many more would have encountered this issue, but were not interested or spend time to blog/talk about it. Particularly, looking at the seat map of this theatre, the chances are more.
If the architect arguing that it is a feature, then it doesn't look like it went with through proper testing with real data or instances.
I really wonder if bookmyshow.com is monitoring the conversion rates, ratio of exits/successful at seat selection and error messages at these junctions. If they ever analyze their web analytics reports, they would be surprised to find this issue screaming at them!
niranjan–given the wording on the error message, it is obvious that this is a planned constraint that has been specifically designed into the system.
Hi guys – I read the post above, along with the comments and I want apologize to all of you for the trouble you have had to go through. Yes, it is possible in order to ensure maximum vlaue for both, our users and cinemas, sometimes there are trade offs. We will try address this issue with some exception rules built in – for cases such as the one above. Do keep your feedback coming and thanks for being customers.
Ashish hemrajani (founder / CEO of BMS)
How is 4 seats booked (+1 empty) from BookMyShow different from 4 seats booked (+1 empty) from ticket window?
Its just lack of insight, not a bug, neither a feature.
Hey..Maybe you should have tried booking two seats at a time.. So you would need to book twice but u could have saved on that extra ticket. So you book seat no. 1,2 and then 4,5.
Hope my tip saves you (and all the readers) some money next time you do the booking..
Hi,
I also faced the same issue while booking for 4 seats for the show of 'Once upon a time in Mumbai'. It is very irritating. Must be addressed for the benefit of the online customer as BookMyShow also charges convenience fee