Is it even possible for MoviePass to get worse? The answer to that is yes. On Friday, MoviePass experienced a significant outage that left users unable to use the subscription service. The problems started early on Friday when subscribers were unable to check into the films that they reserved tickets for. This meant, a number of people who went to the theater, had to pay out of pocket in order to get their ticket. The good news is that MoviePass is offering reimbursements to affected subscribers. But the bad news is, this is just another sign that MoviePass has gone from a pipe dream to an awful service.MoviePass has rolled out some stability changes in order to deal with the issue. They are also suggesting that users make sure the MoviePass app is up to date before leaving to go to the theater. If you’re looking to take advantage of the reimbursement program here’s what you need to know:
- Send a message to the company through the MoviePass app
- You will also need to send a full receipt from the purchase
- Include the movie title, show time and theater
MoviePass will then process the information and provide you with a refund. But doing this isn’t exactly easy. How do you send a message to MoviePass? Where in the app do you look? Open the app, go to the Account tab, scroll down to the Help header and select the Help menu. Select a category—in this case, “Check-in & Redemption Issues”, and then select a question. There is the question “I encountered an app error and had to purchase my ticket out of pocket. Can it be reimbursed?” should be adequate. But if not, you can click the button in the top right that says “Contact Us”, and then start chatting with a MoviePass employee.While outages themselves happen all the time for various technological reasons, this isn’t coming at a good time for MoviePass. The company just rolled out their new surge pricing, which requires users to pay an additional fee for popular movies and showtimes. The fee isn’t set either. It could be as little as $2 or as much as $6. That’s kind of ridiculous, right? I mean, in theory, the idea of surge pricing isn’t a bad one, but at least settle on how much you will charge people.
As we reported last week, MoviePass is losing money, and fast. But we knew that this wasn’t a sustainable system, didn’t we? How can you charge users only $10/month (or less in some cases), and allow them to go and see up to 30 movies per month? Especially since the business model isn’t that sound. All that MoviePass does is reimburse the theater for the full cost of your ticket. Meaning, if you’re only paying $10/month, and you see 10 movies that month, MoviePass has to pay the theater the full cost of your tickets. Which doesn’t make sense as to how they’re making money. Although, one theory is that they were selling users location information, but that got shut down pretty quickly. Regardless, this doesn’t look good for MoviePass, as it’s just one more reason for users to bail.