You hear so many horrible customer service stories that I wanted to take a moment to stop and appreciate the excellent service I have always gotten from The Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore. My husband I have had season tickets there since 2007. One of the great perks of being a season ticket holder is getting to change our tickets for another night if something comes up and we can’t attend a performance on our originally scheduled date. We take advantage of this a lot and the people in the box office have always been super helpful. A couple of years ago I had to change a ticket for Les Miserables, which was a very popular and almost sold out run. The woman in the box office, whose name I sadly don’t remember, wouldn’t change my ticket the night we initially tried to do it because she said she refused to put me in the obstructed view seat that would still result in me paying an upcharge but was the only one she could find at the time for the performance I wanted to attend. Instead she took my information, hunted me down a much better seat and called me the next day to put me in a fifth row center seat.

They were also great when one year while booking our season tickets online my husband didn’t double check our order and reserved us seats we didn’t want. They easily fixed everything for us and put is the seats we actually wanted. The year we completely missed a performance of How the Grinch Stole Christmas because the start time was different than every other show we’ve been to, which was completely our fault, they didn’t blink an eye about rebooking our tickets for us on another night.

This past Sunday I was sad that we had to miss our performance of White Christmas because we felt that the amount of ice on the roads around our house made it too dicey to travel to the theatre. Their performance still went on, which I get. It was the final performance of the run and it was actually great that they kept it going for people who were able to make it to the theatre to enjoy. I tweeted about the fact that I was bummed that I was missing it, but didn’t expect anything to result from it. It was my choice not to attend and seeing as how it was the last performance of the show in Baltimore there wasn’t any way they could rebook me for another night. There were a lot of people complaining on their Facebook page in idiotic ways about how the theatre was being greedy and irresponsible for not canceling or rescheduling the show. They obviously don’t get that the performance is done by a touring company that probably has another city to be in the next day so they can’t just reschedule it. I was just rolling my eyes at those people, and while sad to miss it was not in any way holding the Hippodrome responsible for it. I was pleasantly surprised then to receive a direct message on Twitter in response to my tweet asking me to send them my phone number so they could call and talk to me about my missed performance. I have no idea if they just reached out to people who said something on social media or if they literally contacted every person who didn’t attend the performance, but either way good on them. Someone called me yesterday and offered me additional tickets to Peter and the Starcatcher, one of the shows in our package, or tickets to one of the performances that were outside our ticket package, Blue Man Group or West Side Story. Though I’m sure I could have found friends to take the additional tickets to Peter and the Starcatcher I selfishly went with tickets to West Side Story because I don’t think my husband cares that much for stuff like Blue Man Group. I’ve seen both before and it didn’t matter much to me. I do enjoy West Side Story though, so I guess I’ll enjoy it one more time come April. The Hippodrome certainly went above and beyond in this instance, and it’s one of the many reasons I am happy to continue to subscribe to their Broadway series every year even though I sometimes have already seen half the shows on actual Broadway.