Chase A.
A ticket on a fish hook.
You want to see Jane Smith at a local venue and type “tickets for Jane Smith concert” into your search engine. The tickets seem expensive, more than $100. Gee, is Jane Smith really that popular? Well, good for her! Everything costs more these days. You click “buy tickets.” Later you discover that you were buying through a third-party site and could have bought tickets through the venue for $20.
This is happening for just about any kind of ticket, for shows at smaller venues like the Bur Oak to the Overture Center.
Jess Schuknecht, director of ticketing at Overture, says that reselling happens “for almost every show we offer, from Hamilton and Wicked to smaller shows from local arts groups.” People get a sponsored link from “a company that’s paying Google to show their link first before our legitimate Overture site.”
It’s a problem for the venue as well as the duped customer, he says. Sometimes the customer might decide not to go to the show at all, because it’s too expensive. Trying to explain to someone why their ticket cost $300 while the person next to them paid $70, “is [a difficult] customer service thing.”
Other times, the digital tickets purchased never show up at all and the customer blames the venue. Another scenario: Overture will discover the tickets were bought by a reseller, which is prohibited by its terms and conditions, and cancel the tickets, but the reseller doesn’t tell that to the person it sold the tickets to. “Why would they? They don’t have any interest in that customer service.” For the venues, “it’s a sticky situation. You’re losing goodwill,” says Schuknecht.
Everybody loses. “People are excited for a show but then arrive and find out they paid 10 times what the tickets actually cost — that puts a damper on their evening,” says Schuknecht. Plus “that’s money they could have spent to go out to dinner or grab a drink before the show or a souvenir at the venue.”
A state bill to combat reseller practices, SB 580, did not make it out of committee this spring. Right now, it’s buyer beware.
Best practice, says Schuknecht: Go directly to the venue website or call the box office. If a price seems too high, it probably is.
