Is the ticket resale market just smoke and mirrors?

All unwanted tickets should be resold at their original price or returned to the original seller for resale to genuine fans. The original seller must refund the original buyer subject to the tickets being resold minus a reasonable admin/handleing charge. tickets being advertise for resale should show the original price and all other relevant details.

There is a way to make the market complete transparent but due to conflicts of interests at the top it’ll never happen soon so fans shafted

Yes something needs to be done. Tickets bought from this site will not be accepted at next year’s Commonwealth Games. In all honesty they should be closed on and maybe even severe penalties for people who sell these tickets and who run the site.

The resale of tickets for profit in other European Countries is either banned or heavily restricted.
The UK should follow suit and ban resales outright.

The so called extortionate booking fee only shows up after you purchase the tickets. I was led to believe that this was not a resale site and i was charged 400% more than face value .

I believe the underlying problem is because the venues have simply got lazy. There is a simple solution. Apply to the venue for the tickets. The venue then issues a receipt (not a ticket) and the purchaser turns up for the event with their receipt and payment card, swipes and gets the tickets at the door. If for some reason, before the event, you decide you don’t want the tickets, you cancel online making them available again. Not fool-proof, but would certainly cut down on the touting and reselling.

Within hours the stadium gig was sold out – within minutes the same tickets were being offered for a 300% markup.
When the band’s frontman pulled I was offered a refund at ticket face value.If all ticket resale for profit was banned, genuine fans would stand a chance of face value tickets.

I’ve stopped going to live gigs. Sick of being ripped off.

Get rid of ticketmaster and all these subsidiaries of ticketmaster and get decent software at each venue to allow th venue to sell the tickets direct to the public and ban the software that allows ticket touts to accumulate huge amounts of tickets!

Genuine fans often can’t even get into the ‘ official ‘ sites ! But at the same time the sister sites are already selling tickets at vastly inflated prices, which might be bearable ( just ) but then add handling , postage etc and it becomes ridiculously expensive!! It’s all a total scam and should be banned!

It is quite clear that event ticketing needs to come under significant control. What we have at the moment is an electronic ticket tout system. I cannot be absolutely certain but hope that the Andre Rieu event that I have booked is through a genuine booking process. I do not understand why the event organisers fail to have complete control over ticket sales and that the sale must be to an individual and not to an unnamed block booking account. After all, in many cases it is an individual that is going to occupy the seat.

Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) has levied fines totalling €1.7 million on five ticket agencies

I see allusions to other countries being more in control of this perennial problem/topic. Is it possible for there to be a full examination of the countries which are more in control. Possibly the CMA will cover it but given the number of times the subject comes up you have to wonder why a reasonable solution has not been found.

Italy
The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) has levied fines totalling €1.7 million on five ticket agencies for breaching consumer rights legislation AGCM’s investigation dates back to October, when consumer group Altroconsumo asked the quango to look into allegations primary seller TicketOne was passing tickets directly to the secondary market. It found that while TicketOne, owned by Germany’s CTS Eventim, is “contractually bound to adopt anti-touting measures, [it] did not take appropriate steps to prevent bulk buying through specialist software, nor has it tried to limit multiple purchases or set up a system of ex-post controls to cancel them”.

For violating article 20(2) of the Italian Consumer Code, TicketOne has been fined €1m. Additionally, four secondary ticketing sites – Viagogo, MyWayTicket, Live Nation’s Seatwave and eBay/StubHub’s Ticketbis – have been hit with a collective €700,000 fine for their failure to provide complete ticket information to customers “concerning several essential elements which potential buyers need to make their transactional decisions”. “In particular, the traders would not provide adequate information concerning the ticket features, including their face value, the row and the seat, as well as consumer rights in case of the event’s cancellation,” reads a statement from AGCM. “Moreover, the websites failed to clarify that these traders were mere intermediaries on the secondary market.”
By Jon Chapple, courtesy of IQ Magazine
iq-mag.net/2017/04/italian-ticketers-fines-agcm/#.WPnTF4jyuM9

It was documented in a television documentary that sites like Viagogo have banks of ticket ‘purchasers with multiple credit cards buying tickets as soon as they go on sale. This is ticket touting at its worst but no action was taken by the authorities. The ‘admin’ costs/booking fees are extortionate too.

It seems to me that the ticket resale market is an example of unregulated free enterprise at work.

If I were interested in going to gigs, I certainly wouldn’t want to pay over the odds for my tickets, so I can understand the anguish of those who end up choosing to do this.

However, in comparison with topics like Brexit, energy prices, the NHS and so on, I don’t think gig ticket prices is an area that merits of lot of attention for government action and/or new regulations. I think it would be better if the music industry and its customers could remedy these issues without recourse to help from nanny state.

I was a victim of this ticket fraud recently, I wanted to buy tkts to see my favourite group, I did a Google search was directed to Viagogo.
Viagogo claimed that it was the legitimate seller for the band. The Viagogo website is cleverly designed to induce panic so that you believe that your tkts are on the point of being sold immediately if you don’t buy them.
The Viagogo website also has lots of flashing images popping up on your screen.
At no point could I see your basket or the total value once you add your tkts to the basket.
It is only after the purchase when I received the confirmation email that I realised that (in my case) 2 x £30 tkts so £60 worth of tkts come to over £360 on total on their website.
I am a seasoned tkt buyer, I thought that because Google directed me to Viagogo, this website was an official seller for my band.
They were not, Viagogo are at best scalpers and at worst fraidsters.
Why are they allowed to practise in this way?
Why are Google redirecting and colluding with Viagogo?
If you go on Facebook, you’ll see that thousands of people like myself, have been ripped off.
I’ve been in touch with the venue and they’ve said that the tkts ‘purchased’ from Viagogo do not exist.
There is no seat plan or tkt number for what I believe to have purchased.
So I have been ripped off fraudulently.
Please investigate this company.

These resale sites need to be closed down as it’s totally fraudulent and illegal!

It is not difficult to control, when you buy a ticket online you have to give your billing address and card number to purchase.The venue can then only allow access to the person presenting these 2 details at the venue , If these details are not presented at the entrance to the venue then admittance will not be allowed thus removing resale sites and the very annoying ticket touts outside venues. If you have bought the tickets legitimately then there is nothing to be worried about,only people who have bought resale tickets would have a no admittance problem and once the word spread that resale tickets would not allow access then there would cease to be a market for this , and genuine fans would be able to have a better chance of getting tickets
The other problem is official ticket sales outlets also have resale sites as well, you can’t tell me it’s not better for them to be able to sell tickets at a vastly inflated price through their “sister” sites than to the general public.
I recently attended a large concert in London apparently sold out but at the concert there were large areas of empty seats, I can only assume bought by resale sites and subsequently not been able to sell on thus depriving genuine fans of a chance to see the artist.

We bought tickets from Viagogo for an event in London recently after the last minute cancellation of the Adele concert that we were due to attend. Tickets were bought on the day of the event and arrived as e-tickets, we arrived at the venue and it said e-tickets were not accepted and they would not print the tickets for us as they were resell tickets and not in our name, they checked our tickets and said someone had already entered the venue on these tickets so even if we went somewhere to print them we would not gain entry. The ticket office at the event would not put this In writing for us and just gave us an email address for the promotor of the event to confirm this in writing. Still battling with Viagogo several weeks later to try and obtain a refund, to which they have tried everything possible to avoid a refund under their 100% guarantee, hoping that we will give up, the matter is now with our credit card company. Sites like Viagogo should not be allowed to operate in the UK, they are depriving genuine fans the chance to buy tickets from the official seller for an event by buying them up on an industrial scale.