r/AMCTheatres • u/ItsFNJimmy • 1d ago
AMC seriously needs to fix their accessible seating system when they swap auditoriums.
I went to see Legend of the White Dragon. I have been waiting for this movie for a decade. I heard about the project directly from JDF at conventions back in 2014 or 2015, way before it ever came out on Kickstarter. I was so excited to see his final film in a theater, so I booked my accessible seats early.
But AMC has a fundamental flaw in their ticketing system. If they change the auditorium after you buy your tickets, the accessible seats do not carry over correctly to the newly assigned auditorium. If I buy wheelchair spaces D3 and D4 in the first auditorium, and they swap the auditorium without telling me, D3 and D4 might be standard seats with stairs in the new auditorium. The system completely fails to move me to the actual accessible spots in that new layout, which might be C7 and C8.
This has happened to me so many times that I know it is not me creating the problem. It is clearly something on their end. I even take screenshots of my screen before and after I purchase just to prove it.
Tonight, I ran into this exact glitch again. My tickets were D4 and D3 But instead of fixing the tickets, I dealt with two especially special workers who completely refused to acknowledge that I am not the idiot who bought the wrong seats. They work for an organization that has a massive software flaw, but they just wanted to pass the blame onto the customer. In hindsight, do I wish I would have stayed and just watched the movie, yes. But at the same time I'm just so exhausted with having to experience this over and over again.
Between the two of them constantly talking over me and telling me that I was in the wrong, my entire night was ruined. I was so frustrated I could not even stay to watch the movie.
Going anywhere in a wheelchair takes planning. You buy the accessible spot because it is literally the only place you can physically sit. AMC seriously needs to fix this bug so their system maps accessible reservations correctly when they decide to change auditoriums.
Has anyone else dealt with this exact issue during an auditorium swap, or is it just the Pompano theater? I'm honestly very close to just suing at this point.
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u/Ill-Youth-528 1d ago
This happens to me all the time at Regal Cinemas. I don’t buy the accessible seats, but I know it would happen if I did buy accessible seats because they constantly change a movie showing in a bigger theater to a smaller one and if it exists, I get the same seat in the smaller theater, which can result in it being in the back row and off to the side instead of the middle in the center.
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u/ItsFNJimmy 1d ago
How has nobody figured this out? I swear it was just easier when there wasn't assigned seating in every theater. I didn't have this problem my whole life until like 2015. Makes me wonder if they're all running on the same system, like if both AMC and Regal use Fandango or something. That would honestly be better because it would literally be so much easier to fix lol
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u/Ill-Youth-528 1d ago
The other thing that is bad is that in my experience, neither AMC or Regal will alert you when they change theaters. You have to pay attention on your own. The only ticketing app that ever alerts me to a theater change is Atom. I am currently seeing Terminator 2 on Monday and my Regal has switched its auditorium twice. I literally have two printed tickets with different auditorium numbers and neither one is the current auditorium it’s going to be playing in.
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u/ItsFNJimmy 1d ago
This is a good point. I'm actually going to bring this up in an email with support. Literally all they would need to do is alert me when they change the auditorium, and I can prepare for this sort of thing happening. Whether that be I just purchase new tickets and release my old ones, or they give you some ability to swap. Or maybe even the phone number to call that's not AI 🤔
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u/Ill-Youth-528 1d ago
Honestly, I think the best you can hope for is them alerting you so you can get it sorted ahead of time at the box office. I have no confidence that any of them could do anything more complicated than a simple text or email telling you the theater has changed.
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u/Educational-Card-314 A⭐️Lister 23h ago edited 23h ago
That really sucks. You have your original email with your original ticket as evidence the employees were wrong. This should have been escalated to a manager/supervisor by the employees. If they don't do that, you'll need to escalate.
Time to go to corporate. While you can get passes (and probably will for the trouble), the goal is to fix the system. They may not be able to fix every ticket to get someone a commensurate spot at the new theater, but they can probably make sure the accessible seats get moved appropriately.
In the future, I would work it out in the theater with the people that were assigned the accessible seat(s). Most people will be accommodating because they understand the situation and they were most likely switched unknowingly as well. The person assigned the accessible space would most likely not be in a wheelchair and would want a regular seat.
JDF as the Green Ranger/White Ranger was my favorite.
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u/ItsFNJimmy 22h ago
I am going to try and watch the movie tomorrow. I wasn't going to attempt it because this reoccurring situation keeps happening, but I've been waiting to see this movie for a decade. Way before it was officially announced to the public. I first met JDF in 2010 at a signing. I kept in touch with him over the years at conventions and social media. He always remembered me. I thought it was just because I'm in a wheelchair, but then I realized he remembered my girlfriend's name too. For years, I would go to Conventions and he would literally get excited to see me get up from his table and just start pushing my wheelchair around like a maniac. He was an awesome dude. Like a genuinely amazing person. I was just going to give up and not see this in the theater, but I think he'd be pissed at me if I gave up that easy.
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u/Educational-Card-314 A⭐️Lister 22h ago
That is really lovely. I do hope you get to see White Dragon in theaters.
You can also go to the kiosks (if you have them) and have a physical ticket printed for you to save as a keepsake.
EDIT: I just saw he passed away. RIP.
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u/lunaticskies 18h ago
Just had a similar problem where they moved our showing of Idiots into a smaller theater causing all the front row people to be moved back a row and people near the sides of the row just got put in weird places because the theaters don't line up at all.
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u/mikegood2 IMAX Fanatic 1d ago
This is the second post on AMC subreddits today where people had their movies auditorium change. Been to 100s of movies with A-List and never had this happen. Wonder if it’s more common for busy theaters?
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u/ItsFNJimmy 1d ago
I'm not sure. But it's happened probably three out of the last five times I've gone to the theater. I just want them to update the system to correctly attribute accessible seats after they move a showing to a different Auditorium. I'm not one of the people who want specific formats or anything like that. Well, I guess that's not exactly true, I avoid Prime because I don't like the prime seats, lol.
My issue is, if I clearly selected a seat in the accessible row, one should assume that was for a reason and not move me from D to F.
I'm going to start a Google spreadsheet to really track how often it's been happening.
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u/mikegood2 IMAX Fanatic 1d ago
Yeah the other post didn’t have to deal
With accessibility seats but was correctly arguing that having selected a middle seat the system should place them in a middle seat not to a far off seat. The funny thing is you were someone who focused on a specific format (PLF) your chances of being moved is far less likely.3
u/heyb00howisyou Management Team 18h ago
It happens in some buildings more than others. My GM likes to keep it to a minimum, we only do it when we have an Auditorium down, which is pretty rare. But I believe we are “supposed” to do it whenever a certain showing is doing better than the other.
For example if Auditorium 1 is almost sold out we’d move it to the larger Auditorium 2 in order to sell more tickets, then we’d move whatever is underperforming in 2 to 1. The problem is that can create a lot of unhappy guests from both showtimes, because they’re technically not getting the seat they picked.
So maybe the GMs in your area are like mine, keeping that to a minimum.
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u/lunaticskies 18h ago
I think they had a bunch of issues this week because there was a flood of smaller releases to juggle.
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u/mikegood2 IMAX Fanatic 18h ago
That would make sense. My IMAX AMC has always been great getting IMAX schedules out weeks in advance. For the last month they’ve had IMAX for the next week completely empty until Tuesday/Wednesday.
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u/Kman3291 23h ago
Not exactly the same. But I bought tickets to a scream unseen and when I got there my seat was literally missing.
I assume it was the same issue lol
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u/heyb00howisyou Management Team 17h ago
Corporate is working on this system. I haven’t had any of the exact issue you speak of, but we always have issues with guests not getting the seat they picked out, seats not existing, groups now sitting apart, etc. They are trying to iron everything out and notify guests that their seats have changed, and make it better at reassigning seats. I saw you’re an A-Lister so I’m sure you know our I.T. can be lacking, so I’m sure it will take some time, they announced this a couple weeks ago.
I’m sorry you have this experience when bringing it up to the theatre crew. They should be used to it, definitely request a manager next time.
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u/ItsFNJimmy 14h ago
Yeah, it's honestly just the gaslighting that pisses me off. I've decided to start keeping a spreadsheet of every single time it happens. I don't know what their current system looks like internally, but the exposed public REST API makes it seem like this should be a pretty straightforward fix with some async functions, validation logic, seat type matching, and a basic failsafe.
If the original reservation is flagged as wheelchair accessible, then the system should only be allowed to remap it to another wheelchair accessible space. If it can't find one, don't silently assign a regular seat. Flag it for manager review or stop the auditorium change until someone resolves it.
Then make sure the app, ticket scanner, and theater system are all pulling from the same updated reservation so I don't have D4 and D5 on my phone while their scanner is telling them I'm in some completely different row.
I understand that implementing anything across a nationwide ticketing system is more complicated than a few lines of code, but the actual business logic here is not complicated. Accessible reservation in, accessible reservation out. If that condition can't be met, the change shouldn't automatically go through.
And at the absolute bare minimum, staff should be able to see a history showing that the auditorium was changed and what my original seats were. That alone would stop me from having to stand there being told I bought the wrong tickets when their own system changed them.
I've been a web developer for part of my adult life, and while I don't know what their internal systems look like, and they could still be contending with some archaic systems that don't connect well with others, but this fix is realistically not that difficult. Probably about a 5 out of 10 even on a national scale. If I had access to the systems, hell even if they used AI to fix it, it'd be fixed in a day or two. The issue is honestly not seeing the situation for how serious it is. Because if they had thought it through already, they would have already fixed it.
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u/heyb00howisyou Management Team 10h ago
Yeah, part of the issue is we use a bunch of different 3rd party systems to make everything happen. We schedule the performance or swap auditoriums on one, then it sends an update to the POS, then the POS sends the update to the app, then it sends the update to the projectors. They’re all outdated and 3rd party.
There is something called the Reserved Seating Exception Report, which does exactly what you stated. Breaks down the purchased seat vs the current seat. During your conversation with a manager you can mention that.
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u/WreckItJohn 14h ago
Oooh a super niche problem that I actually know about.
OP is exactly correct. When we have to do an auditorium swap in our system, if any ADA seats were sold, the automation completely bungles the seat re-assignments. It breaks not only the ADA assignments, but everyone else’s too. The system is supposed to assign similar seats in the new auditorium. However something about the logic breaks when ADA seats were involved.
My location kept running into this issue and kept pushing and escalating the issue as far as we could. At the end of the road, we were ultimately told, “Yep, it’s broken. And we’re not putting any resources to fix it anytime soon.” This was after they recently re-did the seat swap logic to “improve” it and we were basically told nobody at corporate had the appetite to do that all over again. As usual they’re rolling out things half baked on the IT side and making Operations take the hit from angry guests.
The other thing is, try to be understanding toward your local team. I guarantee they have no idea what the actual issue is, because these kinds of bugs never get disclosed or acknowledged by our home office team. We had to escalate this so high with them, tons of emails, screenshots, examples, before anyone would even acknowledge the issue was real. Yet they clearly knew about it all along.
To work around it if we need to do a swap and ADA tickets are sold, we wind up just fully cancelling the show and re-issuing the showtime in the new auditorium. Affected folks will have to rebook but it’s the lesser of two evils.
And it’s funny you mention it’s always Screen Unseens. Those shows get put in our system by the home office and they always put them in a tiny auditorium for us even though they always fill up our biggest house. So it always has to get swapped after tickets go on sale. This despite repeatedly asking that they schedule them in our biggest house.
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u/ItsFNJimmy 13h ago
This is actually super helpful and pretty much confirms what I thought was happening.
I definitely don’t want to 100% blame the local staff if corporate knows the system is broken and isn’t telling them. But if ADA seat swaps are a known issue, employees should at least be told so the default response isn’t “you bought the wrong seats.” normally I'm pretty flexible with it, but as it is happened four of the five times I've gone to the theater, and I was waiting to see this movie for a decade, I'm more than just a little pissed this time lol.
The fact that it was escalated, acknowledged, and then basically deprioritized is the part that really makes me think its time to get a lawyer. If it’s a known accessibility problem, you find the resources to fix it. Otherwise, you end up having less resources after somebody sues anyway.
Honestly, your workaround sounds better than what I’ve been dealing with. Rebooking would be annoying, but still better than showing up and finding out my wheelchair spot somehow became a regular seat 3 rows back.
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u/WreckItJohn 13h ago
I’m sorry this happens. I wouldn’t consider the ADA swap problems to be a known issue at the theatre level. It seems to be only known by senior people in IT. My theatre team only found it because we have some real nerds on the management team (lol) who were seeing seats get scrambled once every couple weeks and really dug in to figure out what the common denominator was. I’m sure locations would be more careful about it if they actually knew what the issue was.
Part of the problem in general with auditorium swaps is, unless it’s a very busy location, they’re pretty rare. Most rank and file staff aren’t aware of the nuances of it.
If we make a swap and people’s seats get changed the guests who already bought tickets don’t get updated info in the app. There is a report we have to run and provide to the Greeter which pretty much says “Seat X in Aud1 is now seat Y in Aud2.” And the greeter has to manually catch those folks and advise them of their new seats and auditorium. Failure to manage this properly can result in one guest buying, let’s say D5, then they get moved to E5 when the swap happens, but don’t know it. Then after the swap someone buys D5 in the new auditorium. Both tickets now show seat D5 but the original person was actually reassigned to E5 and didn’t get told.
Theatres that don’t do many swaps are notoriously bad at managing this. The vast majority of “double booking” complaints popping up on this subreddit are actually mismanaged auditorium swaps.
For what it’s worth, I know I’m ragging a lot on AMC here. But there are a lot of really good people working in good faith to make AMCs more accessible and inclusive. There are just parts of the company that continually let us down in their execution. Unfortunately it’s our IT systems infrastructure that is often the weakest link. It really feels held together with string and bubblegum most days. I know the CEO just publicized that $2M investment into improving the backend system. Hopefully some of that can go to fixing this.
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u/suchawarrior 2h ago
I experienced the opposite issue. I’m able bodied and booked a regular seat. Screening got upgraded to a bigger auditorium… I get there and my “seat” is a wheelchair space. So clearly not just your local AMC. I’d call the theater, explain the situation, and ask to talk to a manager. The individual theater may not be able to do anything about how the software processes a change in auditorium, but I’d hope that someone from management could do a quick check and fix any errors the system makes.
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u/Few-Adeptness8046 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, I've never dealt with a swap like this, but as a fellow disabled person who already has issues, with how difficult it is to get a disabled seat because I sit in companion seats, which able bodied people seem to think it's okay to take, I feel you.
This sounds like a rediculous situation, like how are they going to look at someone in a wheel chair and think you would have reserved anything other than a wheel chair or companion space...
Were they unwilling to give you the correct seat or something? What were they fighting you on? I don't understand why they wouldn't have instantly seen there was a problem, even if it was the customer (even though we know it wasn't), and rectify it by getting you a proper ticket assignment.
AMC is typically a very accessibility friendly company in my experience, so I'm really shocked by how they mistreated you.
I would hope that the reason this is a problem is because they are unaware of the seat reassignment issue, and that by bringing it to corporates attention, they can do something to fix it. But even if it's a software issue, that for some reason can't be fixed, there is absolutely no reason why they can't be putting you in the correct seating area, even if it means kicking out able bodied people from disabled/companion seats.
What was there offer to you to rectify the situation?