Monopoly Events - Comic Con Liverpool
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a good con just room for improvement
Me and my partner visited both days over the weekend where he got to meet the cast of his favourite film and he couldn’t be happier with that as the guests were all so nice and were more than happy to sign items and chat. However we encountered so many issues during the day, especially on Saturday. We got let in at 10am with 11am entry tickets and had a pre booked time slot for an Andy Serkis autograph at 11:15, his queue was already wrapping around the building and seemed to be little to no organisation going on. The building was really hot and crowded, and as I struggle standing up for long periods of time especially in heat, a lovely staff member let me use her chair in the queue. A member of staff came down the queue apologising to everyone and we received raffle tickets to come back for the next auto session as Andy had other things to do which is completely understandable so we moved onto our next time slot for a photo with the Mordor trio. There were multiple queues and no staff member we asked seemed to know which queue was which, and when asked, one staff member rolled her eyes and said she wasn’t dealing with it and went to stand with other staff chatting and laughing. My partner was the one to organise queues and asked people who they were waiting for and told them where to go, this isn’t acceptable when we’re paying customers, he shouldn’t be the one to guide other customers when staff say they don’t want to deal with it. On Sunday, there seemed to be a calmer atmosphere and my partner had a diamond pass for that day as he had 4 autos and 4 photos. As we began queueing for a Sean Astin photo, a couple who were deaf were asking questions to the staff at the front of the queue, regarding rules for the photos. My partner who works in event management and organisation recommended hiring a sign language interpreter to make this a better experience for the customer. They were put before us in the queue which isn’t a problem at all, but after their photo one of them walked back to Sean for a solo one, as he didn’t understand the rules regarding one ticket is one photo, this didn’t slow down the process as it took seconds, and Sean was more than happy to take the picture. However the same member of staff from the day before who handed out raffle tickets went to grab the customer and shouted saying he couldn’t do that and making him really confused and panicked. Sean Astin was the one who stood up for the customer and told the member of staff “they’re deaf, they can’t hear you” which the staff looked embarrassed and tried to apologise to Sean, who again was more than happy to take the picture, but didn’t apologise to the customer for shouting in his face. The staff member said they didn’t pay for a second picture but Sean clearly wasn’t bothered about the money and was using sign language back to the customer saying thank you. The couple left looking very confused and we felt this could of gone a lot smoother if there was an interpreter there. The guest and customer should not be put in that situation at all it was completely unacceptable, there were a few other staff around in the photo area and no one said anything, this was a highly uncomfortable situation and I hope this didn’t ruin the experience for the couple. I bought a pay on the day photo with Billy Boyd just after this experience and as my partner was the only one with a diamond pass I asked if I could use his as this photo wasn’t planned and we had another timeslot next and made clear it wasn’t an issue if I couldn’t, and the response was “I mean you shouldn’t but I don’t care” and I got let through with diamond passes. Overall it was a good con with great guests, it was just very overcrowded, we didn’t get much time to look around the stalls on Saturday despite only having one auto and one photo. The attitude of some of the staff was absolutely disgusting and made us feel very unwelcome.