tl;dr If you get a “Secure Ticket selection is required” error when trying to pay for a ticket on the Ticketmaster website, temporarily turn off all your adblockers and reload the webpage.
Nadia and I have gone to the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne pretty much every year since 2007.
Collage of selfies of a man and woman at a tennis tournament. In most photos the pair are outdoors and are wearing hats. In one of the selfies they are standing in front of Rod Laver Arena.
So when the pre-sale for AO25 kicked off today, I went to buy us a couple of tickets.
Screenshot of an email that reads, across multiple lines, “AO25. The hottest tickets in town. Get Set! Your AO25 Pre-Sale hits today. Your access code to early tickets.”
But the Ticketmaster website kept spitting out this “Secure Ticket selection is required” error every time I tried to make the final payment.
Screenshot of a website form-submission error that reads only, “Oops! Secure Ticket selection is required.”
The problem, of course, was that there was no ‘Secure Ticket’ selection visible on this page for me to make.
So I did what any normal person would do: I fired up my favourite search engine and ran a search on that phrase :)
To my surprise, I got only a single hit to a Reddit thread from about a year ago.
Screenshot of a search engine result from the Moto GP subreddit on the topic of ‘Phillip Island race’.
Since most of the people on that thread didn’t have an answer, and the solution only comes at the end of the thread, I figured I’d write this quick post to add to those search results.
Basically, the ‘Secure Ticket’ selection loads from a third-party website and that third-party website component gets blocked by your adblocker. The fix is to temporarily turn off your all your adblockers and reload the page. When you do that, you’ll see the ‘Secure Tickets’ component that was missing from the page before.
Screenshot of a webpage component titled, ‘Secure Tickets’. This upsell tells you that “By upgrading your tickets to a Secure Ticket you will be eligible to receive a refund if you are unable to attend this event for any of the reasons in our Secure Ticket Terms and Conditions”. This component forces you to make a choice between, “Yes, please upgrade me to a Secure Ticket for an additional $8.62” and “No, thank you. I do not wish to upgrade to a Secure Ticket”.
It’s a pain that you’re forced to actively say “no” to this upsell, but I appreciate that they don’t automatically opt you in to it. (Which they’d be fined for if they did, of course.)
But it’s a bigger pain that they haven’t yet implemented this upsell into their main ecommerce sales path, and so it has to load from a third-party domain.
I would have assumed they did this deliberately, thereby forcing people to turn off their adblockers. But if that was the case, they would have told us what to do in the error message. Since they didn’t do that, we can’t attribute this stuff-up to malice – which I guess is a plus, given all the other reasons to dislike Ticketmaster!
Anyway, now you know the workaround so you know what to do if you get that error. (*sigh* What a world we live in.)
PS, for completeness’ sake: a search on Google for that error notification gave me just 14 results, with the top one being the same as the one from DuckDuckGo.
Screenshot of search engine results, the top one from the Moto GP subreddit on the topic of ‘Phillip Island race’.