Hi there,
Just wanted to give some feedback on my experience last night trying to get tickets for the Ghibli museum in Mitaka for July.
I had practiced the month before to make sure I understood how it works and thought I would be fine but in the end, it was all for nothing. This is half a rant, half a post for those interested in trying to secure tickets.
How it works:
- When you go to the Ghibli museum website, you can go the Lawson e-ticket sales website. The site opens ticket sales for a given month on the 10th of at that month, at 10am JST. So if you want say July 15, you need to buy your ticket on June 10.
- At around 9:30am JST on the 10th, a queue is created and you land in a page that tells you that you are going to be placed in a queue at 10am. Apparently your spot will be randomly be assigned based on some refresh or something, not clear to me how it works but I haven't found tons of info online about it.
- Comes 10am, you get a queue #, and you wait. I had 5 devices connected, each with a different queue ID, and my lowest was # 5749. Highest was in around #13000. Note that all devices had been on the pre-queue since 9:30am JST…
- I waited about 40 minutes and by 10:40am JST, I could go on to book tickets. Problem is, already by then, there was nothing left. What was most frustrating is that the timetable showed some availabilities but every time I tried to book tickets, it told me there were none by the time I would get to the confirmation page (after the captcha). We were 2 people trying that and both failed.
So that's it. I don't have specific recommendations on how to avoid this kind of issue. I guess July is also super busy so there was a lot of demand. As far as I know, the Japanese version of the website requires a valid Japan cell phone number to receive SMS confirmations so that was not an option for us.
If you want to see the Ghibli museum, buckle up and have a plan B would be my advice lol
edit: fixed a mistyped date.
by Lumpy_You_7223