A close friend of mine was recently conned by such a practice going to see a certain huge British boy band comeback tour. Take That, obviously. The plan was to take his partner to the concert as part of a surprise weekend in the north east to celebrate her birthday. After paying the hefty fee for the tickets, he was sent an email confirmation, as would be expected from any respectable site. The 'no reply' email stated that tickets would be sent out a week before the said event, as is normal practice, and the concert proceeded to sell out incredibly quickly as expected. No tickets ever arrived, yet the company responded to queries and advised that tickets would be available at the concert box office. My friend then researched the ticketing company and sure enough they didn't exist. Luckily he was able to buy two tickets from the secure eBay and the birthday weekend was a salvaged success, although no compensation was ever received.
Sadly cases like his are becoming increasingly common as many people are stung by these fraudulent activities. Authorities warn that this problem is extremely difficult to monitor let alone control, particularly as more events are being sold online such as sports and theatre outings.
However, there is a simple and readily-available alternative. One such option would be to source all online ticket sales to a single ticketing website yet this would breach competition laws and inevitably lead to even more extortionate handling fees, postage fees, booking fees, listing fees, etc. Furthermore, the introduction of ticketing sites has in part led to this problem as events are often sold through a number of different websites, whereby the genuine are difficult to distinguish from the fake. Therefore this option is an obvious non-starter.
The solution to the problem would be for promoters, artists, venues and labels to sell tickets through their own websites. They can use an online promotion platform, such as Fatsoma to co-promote and network, but most importantly they can set up a ticket-only page on their current site or use the software to build their own full site with ticket-selling capabilities. This means that all customers know they are purchasing genuine tickets as they are getting them directly from the event website. Do not confuse this as a cry to abolish media partners, in fact I believe they have a vital role in this proposed transformation of online promotion. Media partners can use the same platform and promote partner events, linking to the relevant sites.
Promoters, act now. Click the link to find out how to use the Fatsoma online promotion platform to sell tickets online.
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