Like many parents, I have had to live with a teenage daughter upset for months that we didn’t get Taylor Swift tickets. Yes, some opportunities could have arisen but you have to be mindful of cost. The cheapest tickets now to see Taylor also are often bad views despite costing hundreds of pounds.
The pre-sale and general sale of tickets is a nightmare these days. Don’t even get me started on the re-sale market of tickets.
Strangely, in a world where technology has generally assisted to make life better, buying tickets appears more difficult than ever. I remember when tickets would go on sale on a particular date and time for all. You queued up and bought a ticket in person or over the phone.
Greed is part of the issue. Also a lack of investment in booking systems that are not able to cope with the rush and demand of popular events. While I don’t have all the answers, surely some preregistration would help and if it needs to be a lottery as well, so be it. It cannot be less unfair than the current system. The ticket companies don’t seem to be bothered that their potential customers can waste many hours attempting to purchase.
I mentioned greed earlier as some of the presale activity is just about whipping up a fever for the tickets. This in turn creates social posts of success, failure and frustration which all help hype up the event and the difficult nature of gaining the required tickets.
My daughter was hoping to get Sabrina Carpenter tickets that officially went on sale today (26-July). She previously tried two pre-sales unsuccessfully this week. The venue selling the tickets was then sold out some 45 mins after going on sale.
I understand that even a venue for an event of 15K tickets will sell fast, but more needs to be done to make the system fairer and easier.
Surely re-sale should be for those genuinely wanting to sell an unwanted ticket(s). Instead, tickets have fallen immediately into the hands of resellers/scalpers who obviously only intended in re-sell to make a profit. Stubhub and Viagogo are already advertising inflated ticket resale prices almost immediately. The screen grab at the end demonstrates the issue with resale prices while general sale was occurring.
The solution in my opinion is to make it less attractive to deliberately buy to sell on. Perhaps tickets should only be allowed to be sold back to the original ticket company with a fee for cancellation. They can then officially be resold at true original cost. Or, you do not allow the resale of tickets so soon. Perhaps a time constraint needs to be introduced stopping immediate resale. By making it less attractive for scalpers, genuine customers wanting tickets are more likely then to pay a reasonable ticket cost.
Labour and the Lib Dem’s even want to cap the prices of resale sports and events. However, while it’s good to see this being discussed, why cannot the big ticket sellers also act to make ticket purchasing easier. I think presale is a waste of time for starters and how can we have technology capable of allowing millions to stream big sports events live in 4K on their computers and then booking systems still cannot handle peak demands without a queue telling you are number 20000 waiting to buy tickets.
We now have a very disappointed teenager. Of course, with popular events there is always a big risk you will not be successful but considering how much money the ticket sellers make, it’s about time they addressed all the issues.
What is your experience? Please comment below.
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