In a nutshell: If you have any other alternatives, do not use the ticket exchange service of Seatwave.com!
Since there was not anyone to warn me and I was not smart enough to do a small preliminary research on Seatwave's service (as I usually do for other services), I made the mistake to buy tickets via their fan to fan ticket exchange. I suppose, it's needless to say that practically Seatwave is not a "fan to fan" exchange service rather than a platform for reselling tickets on a speculative basis. But this is not the real problem as far as you are aware of it initially and I assume that everyone who is not excessively naive would guess this fact immediately.
The actual issue with Seatwave.com (and all of the website's variations like seatwave.it. seatwave.ie, etc.) is that their service is extremely unprofessional and they rely only on chance in order to complete the ticket exchange between the involved parties successfully. You will read about many guarantees on their site which they offer automatically for free with your purchase of any ticket(s) and you may even pay for some additional protections. All of these mean nothing if you are not prepared to lose a lot of your time and nerves.
So, here goes my experience with Seatwave. Unaware that I should not use them, I ordered several tickets for Paul McCartney's concert on 26/11/2011 in Bologna, Italy. I made the order on 15/11/2011 and it was explicitly stated the tickets were already ready for shipping. Since I didn't receive any tracking information until the end of the next day, I contacted their support with a question when the tickets would be shipped cause I was worried they would not arrive before 24/11/2011 when I intended to fly to Italy. A kind of an automatic reply followed on the next day notifying me that the tickets should be shipped on 18/11/2011 (three days after my order). I actually received a UPS tracking number on 18/11/2011. For my surprise, after checking the tracking information I found that the scheduled delivery by UPS was for 25/11/2011. I would not need the tickets at that time. I contacted Seatwave support again (a little bit more worried now) and this time I received a human response informing me that the tickets probably would travel faster and I should expect them to arrive by the end of 22/11/2011.
I checked the UPS tracking page again on 21/11/2011 and I found the tickets were not travelling fast enough and I didn't see any chances that they would arrive on the next day. I contacted Seatwave.com support once more. This time they confirmed that according to UPS the tickets would arrive on 25/11/2011. And now the bigger fun began. I contacted Seatwave via the chat option on their website. Without even asking them about a refund (I didn't care for a refund at that point anyway) they informed me they would not refund me because the tickets would arrive before the date of the event. Seatwave's support didn't care the delivery would be after my flight to Italy and they also didn't even try to observe their User agreement which stated that Seatwave would try to deliver the tickets at least 2 days before the event and if they were unsuccessful in that attempt they would either find replacement tickets or otherwise refund the full amount you had paid.
I explained to them that they were in violation of their own user agreement and the fun continued. They answered me that normally people had to travel to the venue at the date of the event and more bullshit like this. I still do not believe that most people book flights for international trips at the actual date of the flight, especially when they intend to attend a concert or any other kind of event. After almost a whole day lost in stupid arguments with Seatwave's support, I informed them again that I didn't care about the refund and all I wanted was they keep their guarantees listed on their site. I wanted tickets, not a refund which I would get one way or another if eventually I needed to.
Read the second part of this article by following the link Seatwave.com Experience, Part 2.
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