Rather foolishly when my daughter asked if we could go and see Declan McKenna I said yes. The website said 2 tickets available for £30.40.

She bought the tickets on my card and I’ve just had the confirmation – £88.50!!!!! Holy ****!!! #

It turns out there are plenty of tickets available through the normal channels for £11 each with no additional charges, so I’ve been well and truely done over. Viagogo was the site.

Is there anything I can do to avoid paying these robbing bastards? Apparently a debit card payment is a guaranteed payment so I can’t block the payment 🙁

# edit: The £88 is £30.40 x 2 tickets, plus a £10 charge plus booking office fee per ticket.

I expect you’re shit out.

http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/can-i-get-a-refund-on-my-ticket

You could try asking nicely for a refund, but I don’t fancy your chances with Viagogo.

Could have been a lot worse, robbing bastards were putting up tickets for Depesh Mode at the Glasgow 6Music Festival asking £800!
Thing is, it was made perfectly clear before the sale date that all tickets carried the name of the person booking them, and ID would be required before entry would be allowed, plus the person selling them would be in breach of the T&C’s. This is the system used by Kate Bush two years or so ago, and which seemed to work ok.
This should be the standard for all larger venues, and the ticket companies need to be forced to separate themselves from their secondary selling subsidiaries, like Getmein.com, which is owned by Ticketmaster, I believe.
I have no issues with people wanting to offload surplus tickets and making a small profit, to cover their original costs, plus postage and a bit on top, but people are really taking the piss now.
I know it’s claimed that it’s all down to supply and demand, and someone on RadMac said that if fans want tickets, how else can they get them, but that’s giving into the robbing sob’s; there’s no bloody way I’d hand over that sort of money, no matter how much I wanted to see someone, I begrudge paying more than about forty quid for a ticket, face value.
I did pay the face value for my Kate Bush ticket, which was eye-watering, but I don’t regret it, it was a remarkable experience.
I wouldn’t have paid more, though, I just wouldn’t have been able to afford it!

but people are really taking the piss now.

It’s not “people” on the whole, it’s organisations. Half the reason 9am ticket releases are sold out by 9:01am is they’re hoovered up in bulk to be resold.

🙁

Hat off to the BBC for stating that the 6 Music ticket in that there Scotland will be checked and that the name of the original buyer, as named on the ticket, will get in. This should effectively kick the touts resellers into touch.

You got off lightly

“Tickets for the hit show have a face value of between £25 and £45 each, but Angela Evans bought hers through controversial booking site Viagogo.

The bill the Gwynedd gran received lists the price per ticket at £109.12, giving a subtotal of £436.48 and also adds a booking fee of £124, VAT at £24.80 and secure ticket delivery at £9.95 – giving a staggering total of £595.23.”

http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/mrs-browns-boys-rhyl-tickets-12554653

I tried to get the DM tickets from BBCR6 and when I looked at the website half an hour before hey went on sale there was already a queue in place. How does that work?

So reluctantly I joined the queue to get on the website and eventually got in only to find all the DM tickets had gone.

Still I have my tickets for London.

had to use viagogo recently for 2 premier league darts tickets, with the extra charges i ended up paying £75 a ticket for tickets with a face value of £28. only tickets available direct at the right price were single seats in differant areas of the arena.
possibly was my own fault for leaving it to last minute though.

2x£55 Tickets for Nick Cave at the O2 came out at £129:50 through the O2 website. Tickets in the same block were between £450 and £950 elsewhere.
I thought the O2 charges where reasonable compared to those prices!

The only way this will stop is when artists take the same approach as Kate Bush & put their fans first. It proves that it can be done, if they care enough about their real fans…
My kids desperately want to see the Harry Potter stage show thing. It’s just one big disappointment every time they release some tickets.

Ticketmaster are scum, in every way, shape & form.

Thanks to these ‘reselling’ sites working the way they do I haven’t been to a big name show for years, not worth the hassle and expense over the ticket price.

Ticketmaster tried to do a ‘deal’ with the theatre my sister works at as it may only be a small one but it regularly gets big shows and acts using it as their pre-tour warmup venue. They wanted to take 25% on top of every ticket as a fee and charge around £5-6 for delivery plus have first shout on all tickets, presumably to block buy for reselling. This was on ticket worth £15-50 that cost £1.25 (charged at cost to the buyer) or can be picked up free at the venue before the show. They were told to shove it and the box office work on a straight first-come basis without any issue. One of the promoters of a few regular acts heard about the Ticketmaster approach and said straight that one of the reasons they go to her theatre is that it uses a fair system to allow genuine fans to see these pre-tour shows on a fair basis.

Hate the reselling scam 👿

We have the power to stop this by not using them. ID checks are the way forward.

It’s not “people” on the whole, it’s organisations. Half the reason 9am ticket releases are sold out by 9:01am is they’re hoovered up in bulk to be resold.

Leftfield at Brixton being an example recently. I was on-line at 9am and missed out. Face value was nearly £40 so there’s no way I’m going to one of the re-sellers to have my pants pulled down.

@milky1980 which theatre? I’m looking for something to go to in London. Any recommendations?

ID checks are great til you buy a ticket for someone else, or the ticket buyer can’t make it to a show but the others can, or a parent buys it for a kid.

Besides, it’s not really the problem- the problem is bulk “reselling”. Hands up everyone who believes that Getmein, a Ticketmaster company, queues up like everyone else to buy their tickets, via the website, in maximum orders of 4 at a time? These tickets were never on sale. That part’s just racketeering.

It’s not “people” on the whole, it’s organisations. Half the reason 9am ticket releases are sold out by 9:01am is they’re hoovered up in bulk to be resold.

Yep.

Blondie tix at the Roundhouse went on sale at 10:00 on Friday & were all sold out by 10:01.

What time do you think tix appeared for that gig on Getmein?

Yep.

10:01!

At 3-4 times the face value!

Taking the fekin piss!

I went & bought tix for Leftfield instead – which I am far happier with TBH & I got them at face value from Ticketmaster.

A quick Google brings up loads of horror stories about Viagogo – mainly people who’d bought tickets receiving an email hours before the gig saying they weren’t valid, and wouldn’t get them in.

Viagogo also seem to be undercutting legit ticket outlets that have them in stock. They were listing tickets for De La Soul in Leeds tomorrow at less than face value, glad I googled them first.

What annoys me is that whenever a Radio 4 or a Watchdog drag someone from one of the big resellers on the radio or the telly they, with a straight face, try to claim that the secondary market is for people who bought tickets and can’t make the show for unforeseen reasons, and then they offer “power seller” packages to parties selling 10K plus tickets a year – that’s an awful lot of unforeseen circumstances…

Hat off to the BBC for stating that the 6 Music ticket in that there Scotland will be checked and that the name of the original buyer, as named on the ticket, will get in.

The problem with using ID to validate is that they buy 6 tickets, sell 5 of them for a fortune each, escort 5 people in, make a loss on one ticket but a massive profit on the other 5 that have been sold.

Seen that done several times in the past.

Do distance selling regs cover returns?

hmm, possibly not: http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/regulation/distance-selling-regulations

We were forced to use a reseller recently for billy Conelly. 6 of us wanted to go, but we couldn’t buy 6 seats together from the box office…

I wasn’t party to the booking (was just asked “billy conelly £55?” And wrongly assumed reasonably good seats), otherwise I’d have told them to shove it.
Especially as when we got there the place was only half full and we were sat facing sideways whilst watching a big screen as we were that far back – face value was £30 iirc…

There’s no such thing as Distance Selling Regulations. It’s the Consumer Rights Act and / or the Consumer Contracts Regulations which apply now.

See the Which link I posted earlier. Concert tickets seem to be exempt from this, for reasons I don’t fully understand.

The problem with using ID to validate is that they buy 6 tickets, sell 5 of them for a fortune each, escort 5 people in, make a loss on one ticket but a massive profit on the other 5 that have been sold.

The name of the person on every ticket rather than just the lead booker would solve that, no?

“ID checks are great til you buy a ticket for someone else…“

The ticket should have their name on it.

“…or the ticket buyer can’t make it to a show but the others can“

Their ticket is returned to the box office for a refund @ face value.

There’s some admin involved in making it all work, but this can’t be rocket science, surely ?

Some interesting reading on how the ticket market works. The man who broke Ticketmaster

@milky1980 which theatre? I’m looking for something to go to in London. Any recommendations?

Seeing as hers is in Wales, no 😆

had to use viagogo recently for 2 premier league darts tickets, with the extra charges i ended up paying £75 a ticket for tickets with a face value of £28. only tickets available direct at the right price were single seats in differant areas of the arena.

Had to? Seriously? It really was a life or death decision?
Nobody has to buy tickets for any event, not buying them will result in disappointment, not the death of containers full of kittens.

It’s not “people” on the whole, it’s organisations. Half the reason 9am ticket releases are sold out by 9:01am is they’re hoovered up in bulk to be resold.

Last I looked, those organisations are run by ‘people’.

It does annoy me, it can’t be that hard for the original ticket vendor to spot when resellers are buying them up.

That said, the people bulk buying are probably paying them a kick back, or even buying in bulk tickets that are say £20 face value, for £30 quid each knowing damn well they can still pass them on for a few quid more and make a healthy profit on resale.

Last I looked, those organisations are run by ‘people’.

Point is, it’s not individual personal sales. Pedant.

It’s a free market though, of people are paying a hundred quid for a fifty quid ticket through a reseller it just encourages the problem.

The resellers would soon go out of business if they buy up half an arena of tickets and suddenly no one bought them.

had to use viagogo recently for 2 premier league darts tickets, with the extra charges i ended up paying £75 a ticket for tickets with a face value of £28. only tickets available direct at the right price were single seats in differant areas of the arena.

Had to? Seriously? It really was a life or death decision?

you don’t know my wife 😆