When Corey Pender attempted to buy NFL playoff tickets in , he was no stranger to the secondary market. A year-old software solutions director, he considers himself tech-savvy. Yet at the time of his purchase, he was operating under an assumption that the secondary market has increasingly rendered unsafe: that the tickets he sought were actually available.
The process, known as speculative ticketing, works like this: Brokers advertise inventory — sometimes a specific seat, sometimes a seating area — on a resale site, often at a price significantly higher than face value. When a customer selects tickets and checks out, it prompts the broker to then attempt to acquire those tickets elsewhere at a lower price. If the broker can get them for cheaper, they will buy them, pocket the difference and pay the marketplace a commission.
Yet in the decade that followed, speculative selling persisted across the secondary market, and fans continued to feel deceived. A lawsuit against TicketNetwork , filed by then-New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood in , detailed the scope of speculative selling on its platform. Between Jan. The company admitted no liability.
Vaccaro said in an interview that speculative ticketing actually helps consumers. Ticketmaster, the official seller for the United Center in Chicago, had announced that listings for a Jan. Next to this language was a question mark. TicketNetwork has also landed in hot water for other consumer practices. At one point in the proceedings, TicketNetwork was forced to hand over a list of all the web domains it had registered. A page spreadsheet the company produced included more than 4, of them: chittychittybangbangonbroadway.
But complaints to regulators tell another story. Her search for tickets led her to boxoffice-tickets. Immediately doubting her purchase, she started poking around.
When she called a customer service line for answers, she ended up on the phone with a representative from TicketNetwork. Resigned, Valentine asked to be emailed her tickets immediately. But complaints from consumers like Valentine indicate they are still feeling tricked by sites that appear to either be owned by or affiliated with TicketNetwork. In , one music fan who bought marked-up Lollapalooza tickets wrote to the Illinois attorney general about a site called ticketsmeters.
The fan described calling a customer service number to complain. Instead, she offered a rough location: South Windsor, Connecticut — the town of 25, people where TicketNetwork is based. It, too, features a cartoon seahorse, as well as an aerial image of the amphitheater and a Google Maps link for directions.
Companies like his, he added in an interview, drive down prices because they provide ticket buyers more options. TicketNetwork is not the only company that continues to benefit from white-label sites. According to a report by the National Consumers League and Sports Fans Coalition, four white-label domains — tickets-center.
Last-second fees are perhaps the most common frustration for consumers who seek to buy tickets online. In , when the FTC asked the public for comments about the industry, nearly 7, people and organizations responded.
In , the prominent reseller StubHub piloted a solution to hidden markups called all-in pricing. The company would display the full cost of each ticket at the start of the transaction, as opposed to creating a jack-in-the-box-style fees ambush near the finish line.
They steered clear. This problem is not intractable. Legislation introduced by Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N. In February , leaders in the secondary ticket market were called before Congress to explain their fees.
But on eventticketscenter. But on boxofficeticketsales. They state that it creates a fair, open market that both parties are agreeable toward. Those who want to make the practice illegal argue that the system favors the wealthy and prompts scalpers to buy large quantities of tickets strictly for resale. If the reseller buys up the tickets, fans may not have the opportunity to purchase tickets at their original cost.
When scalpers buy large quantities of tickets, they take the risk of failing to resell all of them, losing money. People who attend concerts or sporting events are usually emotionally invested in that event, and resellers take advantage of those feelings.
Others see themselves as businessmen. In an effort to compromise on ticket scalping laws, licenses or permits are often required, and the decision to make scalping illegal is made by individual states or municipalities. Please enter the following code:.
Scalpers can now offer tickets on eBay, or through online message boards that local law enforcers may not monitor. For years, however, one principle had remained stubbornly inviolate: Event promoters didn't scalp their own tickets. Not so anymore. Recently, two major league baseball teams decided if they couldn't beat scalpers, they would join them. The Chicago Cubs' parent company established a corporation with the sole purpose of scalping Cubs tickets. The Seattle Mariners took a different, though similarly nefarious, approach.
Wrigley Field, Major League Baseball's second oldest and third smallest ballpark, has long been a prime tourist attraction. It's also been a home away from home for the "Bleacher Bums" who have flocked to the park year after year even though the National League's Cubs haven't played in a World Series since From until , the statute also forbade the resale of tickets at a premium.
But in the act was amended to regulate rather than ban scalping: Street scalping is still prohibited, but registered ticket brokers may resell tickets at a premium so long as they do so from permanent offices established for that purpose. The registration provisions, which also prescribe a set of consumer protection standards that brokers must observe, were seen as sufficient to protect the public from unscrupulous or fly-by-night scalpers.
McGuire proposed that the Tribune Company establish a ticket brokerage of its own. Like the existing ticket brokers, McGuire's would buy tickets from the Cubs at face value and resell them to the public for whatever price the market would bear. Premium complied with all statutory registration requirements and opened its doors a few blocks from Wrigley Field in June It could requisition tickets directly from the Cubs' box office before they went on sale to the general public, and it did.
It could obtain the most popular seats, in the boxes and bleachers, and it did. It could "pay" for these tickets with an intercompany accounting entry, not cash or a credit card, and it did. If Premium found itself with more tickets than it could sell at the desired price, it could return them to the Cubs' box office for credit. Imagine the look a street scalper would get at the ticket window if he tried to return his unsold tickets.
The games sold out minutes after the Cubs put single-game seats on sale in February. Premium and the Cubs defended their practice by explaining that the tickets Premium was selling weren't ones that would otherwise have ended up in the hand of Joe Wrigleyville. The commissioner's office says that no such reserve rule existed. Major League Baseball, and the owners of other clubs, had their own reasons to question Premium's operations.
The league requires that each club pay 34 percent of its local revenues into a common fund that is then divided equally among all 30 clubs, as part of a revenue-sharing program designed to help poorer ones the Minnesota Twins, for example stay competitive with teams from bigger markets like Boston.
The Cubs weren't quite that brazen, but they clearly weren't eager to share their take from Premium with Major League Baseball, either.
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