ADVANCE TICKETS FOR MUSEE D'ORSAY AND MANET EXHIBITION

(The posting before this, A WEEKEND IN PARIS, starts with my wife and me visiting the Musée d’Orsay and Manet exhibition. What follows is intended as a warning to anyone hoping to buy advance tickets before they set out on their trip to Paris.)


Getting into the Musée d’Orsay on a sunny Sunday afternoon was not easy for us because several thousand others had also thought to make the trip and the crowds outside the building, forming multi-serpentine queues, made it hard even to see the entrances let alone approach them.

We were privileged. We had a piece of paper that confirmed us as having already purchased our tickets both to enter the Musée and to the Manet Exhibition within. We joined a small queue dedicated to those who had reservations with our piece of paper ready to wave under official noses. One official, carrying out brief inspections prior to entry, did not like the look of our piece of paper – there was something on it that bothered him – but gave in under the pressure of our passion to gain admission and then, all of a sudden, we were … dedans – well ahead of all those thousands of people.

The piece of paper was headed ‘Musée d’Orsay Billeterie en ligne’ printed in a good strong grey and orange. In a muted shade of yellow brown it also said ‘Vente et reservation avec fnac.com’. It showed that we had booked entry tickets for the gallery and the Manet exhibition and had paid Euros 23.20. The heading was ‘Confirmation of reservation’. We had an order number as well. Everything was, forgive the pun, tickety-boo.

On the piece of paper it said that it was not a ticket. To obtain the ticket we should Pick them up at the shop – in red. (I mention the colours only to illustrate how one’s eye was drawn to certain parts of the piece of paper).

So, to the shop in the Musée d’Orsay we went - and they didn’t know what the blazes we were talking about. They were certainly not going to part with any tickets to the likes of us. The piece of paper meant nothing to them.

It turned out that the tickets had been sold to us by an organisation called Fnac – not the Musée d’Orsay – and the shop where we should collect our tickets was in the bloody Champs Elysées, a not inconsiderable distance from where we then were.

By this time we had gathered together with two other British couples who had been similarly conned. One pair decided to fight it to the end and would not move until they had obtained a refund of their money (Fat Chance my dears!). We and the other couple joined a very short queue, paid Euros 20, and got in.

And loved it. We forgot about our wasted Euros 23.20 and got stuck in to Manet, the great collection and a pretty good lunch in the most wonderfully over-the-top decorated restaurant.

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Now there is time to reflect on exactly what took place when I attempted to buy tickets online. Remember, the queues outside the Musée are dauntingly large. Tickets in the hand for visits planned as you board Eurostar give one comfort. I wanted this visit to be an easy one. If you go to

www.musee-orsay.fr/en/visit/admission/tickets.html

you will see what faced me. There are two choices. The first is to buy via fnac.com, the second is via Ticketnet.fr. I chose the former. (I did try the latter but it was like attempting dialogue with a Toby jug). I booked using fnac.com. I paid my money with my credit card and pieces of paper were sent to me.

It is true to say that one of the documents sent by email when I made my credit card purchase said ‘Prepaid tickets are not delivered at the sites to which they give access and should be collected exclusively from one of our stores’. However, this only appears in the document that comes as a confirmation of your order and it does not tell you where those stores are: just ‘our stores’. Never having heard of fnac before the notion of it having stores didn’t connect with me.

With this confirmation comes the other piece of paper, which one cannot help but think of as a proxy-ticket, which tells you that you have bought tickets to the Manet Exhibition and you should Pick them up at the shop. Art Galleries have shops. See the illustration above; what do you make of it? Is it not reasonable to assume that you should go to the Musée and go to its shop? This poxy proxy-ticket does not tell you anything about fnac nor where one might find one of its shops (we eventually discovered from someone in the queue that an fnac shop is to be found on the Champs Elysées as I mentioned before). It does, however, clearly state as a heading the words Musée d’Orsay Billetterie en ligne which rather gives the impression that one has just been doing business with one of the most famous – and presumably trustworthy - art galleries in the world.

When I go to the humble old Odeon in Kettering I buy my tickets in advance, online. I do not pay the cinema, I pay another organisation that charges me 75p a tickets on top of the admission price. I make an assessment as to whether that extra charge per ticket is worth it to me. It always is because I hate queues. I go to the Odeon, put my credit card into a machine and out come the tickets. The ticket selling company does not require me to go into the heartland of Sunny Kettering, locate a shop and then collect my tickets.

We seem to live in a world where organisations base their activities on ‘what they can get away with’. You would not go to court over these fnac documents because they do actually tell you most of what you should be told but they present the information so inadequately yet so skilfully that you are misled. Also they do not tell you what the snags are before you make the buying commitment, they tell you afterwards, when they have your money. And they do not tell you where their bloody shops are.

Turn it around and imagine you were writing the information for your customers and you wanted them to know exactly what the deal was. Would you create the document at the head of this post?

It bothered me at the time and still bothers me that those working in Musée d’Orsay to whom I spoke claimed never to have seen my piece of paper before or had ever been in such a situation before. Yet, gathered around the ticket sales counter there were three English couples clutching those pieces of paper, those non-tickets; surely there were many, many more in the course of just that one day that were similarly frustrated and – dare I use the word, ‘conned’? Could it possibly be that all previous purchasers of fnac non-tickets had found a store and obtained their tickets before trekking over the Seine? No, I think those Musée folk just wanted to avoid trouble and I don’t think any of them had the authority to do anything about it.

The end to the story is a hoot. Above you’ll see that we abandoned the fruitless task and just bought tickets. At lunch we shared a table with a very pleasant couple from Wales who had entered effortlessly. As they approached the gallery they saw a kiosk, an independent concern that sold things like newspapers, with a small notice saying that tickets for entry to the gallery and the Manet exhibition were on sale there. No ticket dispensing machine or counter. Just a man with a box of tickets. Twenty euros and a couple of minutes later there they were in the Musée d’Orsay. The couple swore that the operation was kosher.

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I will end this by saying that apart from the frustrations described above April in Paris is everything it says in the song.