Sulkyblue's Blog

The following rant has just been sent to the lovely customer services people at Vue cinemas. I look forward to being completely ignored.


I've just had a really miserable experience in your Acton cinema, not the first time to be honest, but this is the worst experience I've had in a very long time.

1) In the foyer of the cinema are 3 touch screen ticket machines and a kiosk with 4 or 5 windows. When we arrived for the 5pm, Saturday showing of Star Trek there was ONE machine working and NO kiosk windows open. There were five food counters open which were also selling tickets, but they were breath-takingly slow queues for those were even slower moving. With three of us, we divided up to each queue in a different place. Eventually a manager turned up and managed to activate a second machine which had RUN OUT OF PAPER! It took us 15 minutes to buy tickets.

2) The ticket machine was not easy to use, it insisted on asking me which seats we wanted, but wouldn't actually allow me to select seats. Eventually I just hit 'next' and that passed it through happily. It turned out there wasn't actually allocated seating for the film, so it should never have even asked about the seats. Each person in the queue had this issue I would imagine, slowing things down even further.

3) Queuing. The Acton cinema has a very large foyer with plenty of space for intelligent queuing systems. Instead it uses the old school "one queue per counter" method, which is hugely inefficient and frustrating. There's plenty of space for one queue to then split for each counter, speeding the whole thing up and preventing the person just trying to buy tickets from getting stuck behind someone wanting complicated food orders.

4) This is a strange complaint... but when we eventually made it into the cinema at a couple of minutes past 5, the 5pm showing had already started. I've become somewhat accustomed to half an hour of adverts and trailers, and actually really like the trailers. More of a problem was the fact that the cinema was completely pitch black when we arrived to a reasonably full cinema and had to try to find 3 seats. For the first 15 minutes of the film it was hard to pay attention as people stumbled in and tried to find ever decreasing seats. If you're going to change the now assumed system that a 5pm showing means the adverts start at 5, the lights remain on low setting and people have 20 minutes to get sorted - then you need to make a lot of noise about it (I checked the website and it doesn't seem to mention it).

5) This one is a bit tricky for you to deal with. But at a time when I'm being encouraged (or nagged!) to go to the cinema instead of downloading films (which I actually don't do) the cinema experience needs to be a positive one. I was already pretty annoyed due to all the above, but had hoped that once I sat down I would be able to appreciate the film. Sadly the other visitors to your cinema did not seem to feel the same way. There were several groups of people shamelessly talking throughout the film, other people looking at their phones projecting patches of light in the cinema. The noise level of people eating popcorn (and the disaster zone the place looked like afterwards) indicates a horrifying lack of manners.

Now I realise that the rudeness of the general public is not really your responsibility, but I would really like to see cinemas have 'stewards' or something similar - people who sit in the cinema watching films (not a difficult job to sell) and make sure that things are running ok. I've been in plenty of showings that have had technical faults and relied on the audience member getting up and wandering the halls trying to find someone to report the issue (while missing a chunk of the film they've paid for). I can't imagine you'd have to pay much more than the minimum wage to someone to watch films all day and occasionally ask people to stop talking. Even just a simple 'alert' button to summon a steward to the cinema without having to wander the halls.

Going to the cinema is not a cheap thing to do, myself and two friends paid nearly 25 pounds for the pleasure of being put into a really bad mood. For that amount of money I expect a certain quality of service. If you were promoting yourself as a "budget cinema" then understaffing would be acceptable, but for a cinema that even has "Superior Seats" I expect polite, efficient service, a clean, uncluttered building and a pleasant viewing experience.

I am a big fan of movies, but increasingly end up only going to see big special effects movies for which the benefits of the big screen overwhelm my hatred of your cinema. My bad mood is nothing to do with the film, which I thought was superb. The "Cinema experience" now comes to mean something entirely different and it's not something that will discourage people from pirating films or just legally waiting for a dvd.

Not sure if this link works but it goes to a survey that popped up from a site which has the above question on it. How do people pass this thing? Who on earth looks at that and thinks it's a suitable question to inflict on people on the internet?!