The Great Alaska Craft Beer & Home Brew Festival, known as Beerfest, was canceled six months ago and hundreds of people who bought tickets haven’t seen refunds. Southeast Alaska State Fair, the event organizer, said the online box office is to blame.
The Southeast Alaska State Fair canceled the 28th annual Beerfest in early April due to COVID-19. Fair Director Kari Johnson said it was a hard decision. Beerfest isn’t just a good time, it’s a moneymaker that helps make other events — like the fair itself — possible.
Virtual box office Brown Paper Tickets manages the ticket sales.
“They kind of assured us that it would be, you know, they’d see refunds within six weeks. And now, six months later, we’re still kind of dealing with some people not having received their refunds,” Johnson said.
She said she understands the frustration ticket holders may feel if they haven’t seen their refunds yet because she’s frustrated, too.
The fair sold over 1,000 tickets through Brown Paper Tickets, but the company isn’t giving her access to basic information about the transactions. She can’t see exactly how many tickets were sold, who’s been refunded and who hasn’t.
“Basically, unless someone contacts us, we don’t know whether or not they’ve received their refunds or not. And so we’ve been trying to have people slowly contact us,” Johnson said. “We say, ‘please just let us know,’ because we want to kind of figure out what’s going on and who’s received it.”
Johnson said she wants to make it right, but there’s not much she can do yet. The fair hasn’t seen any money from the ticket sales, so they can’t refund ticket buyers. Johnson said in the last email she received from Brown Paper Tickets, the company said all dinner tickets and connoisseur tasting tickets were refunded. But general admission tickets — the biggest seller — hadn’t been processed yet. Johnson estimates that’s $40,000 in sales.
The fair is supposed to get money back, too, since some would-be Beerfest goers donated their tickets to help keep the organization afloat through the pandemic.
The fair has worked with Brown Paper Tickets since 2013. Johnson said there’s never been a problem before, but now the nonprofit is considering its legal options.
It wouldn’t be the first entity to take suit against Brown Paper Tickets this year. Washington state’s district attorney is taking the company to court in two lawsuits — one class-action suit for ticket buyers and another for producers.
The Alaska Attorney General’s Office said it cannot divulge whether complaints have been filed against Brown Paper Tickets, but encouraged anyone who feels they are the victim of consumer fraud to report it.
Brown Paper Tickets did not respond to inquiries about this story, but company president William Scott Jordan posted a statement to its website in mid-September. He wrote that the company is working through its backlog of ticket refunds. Scott said the company doesn’t have a timeline for specific events since thousands have been canceled, postponed or abandoned.
He wrote, “Like many businesses, we were unprepared for a crisis of this scale, but we are making headway.”
In the meantime, the Southeast Alaska State Fair staff is still working to ascertain the scope of the problem. If you purchased a Beerfest ticket that hasn’t been refunded yet, you can reach the office at 907-766-2476.
