A few days ago, I decided to cancel my membership to the Sinemia Private Movie Club. I have been a member of Sinemia since it launched in Canada eight months ago. As someone who sees a lot of movies over the course of a month, being a member of the service was a real money-saver for me, especially since I was locked into my sign-in rate of $15.99 a month.
So why, you may ask did I decide to cancel my membership? The simple answer is that the service stopped working for me.
You see, when I signed up Sinemia sent me a membership card that was essentially a prepaid Mastercard. I use the Sinemia app to activate the card for a certain showtime and I would be able to purchase a ticket like I was using a regular credit card. I had very few issues ordering tickets through this method and even struggled when Sinemia added a $2 service fee to each order, since I was still paying much less to see movies.
Then Sinemia introduced cardless payments.
Sinemia Cardless has been rolling out for a few months now and finally reached its Canadian customers in November, with the physical cards being deactivated at the end of October. Now, customers are asked to use the Sinemia app to get advanced tickets for the give and you are given a one-time use credit card number to use for the online purchase. Suffice to say, this new method of payment did not work as well as the physical. That it, it doesn't really work at all.
While I did somehow manage to use the cardless payment method to get a ticket last weekend to see The Girl in the Spider's Web, all by subsequent attempts to order tickets using the cardless method has resulted in the payment being denied by Cineplex. My hypothesis is that Cineplex doesn't accept the zip code that you are given to confirm payment. I'm guessing this because I somehow didn't have to give a zip code when I ordered a ticket for The Girl in the Spider's Web last week.
For me, it's better to cut and run than continue paying for a service that I can no longer use. Doing a quick Google search shows that this is not an isolated problem and Sinemia customer service has either been unhelpful or non-responsive. However, I'm not fully off the bandwagon for movie theatre subscription services and hopefully a better and more legit one will be launched someday by Cineplex or some other company.
