Elisha Dacey 2008-12-21 Kelowna Courier:
When Mike Oughtred tried to buy tickets at Ticketmaster.ca to the upcoming Bryan Adams concert at the Kelowna Community Theatre, he clicked on the “Tickets Now” box when he discovered it was sold out. What he found there were two dozen more tickets for sale – all at more than twice the $125 original ticket price and some at more than four times the original price. “I thought, what the hell is that,” said Oughtred, who is the sales manager at Kelowna Nissan. Ticketsnow.ticketmaster.com is a Ticketmaster-owned website that resells premium tickets at a premium price. Oughtred calls it scalping. “It‘s like they‘re making tickets deliberately more. If Ticketmaster wanted to sell the tickets at $450, then they should sell the tickets at $450. Of course, no one would buy them.”
The Bryan Adams concert, to be held Feb. 9, sold out in less than two minutes. As of 2 p.m. on Friday afternoon, there were 24 tickets available for the show through TicketsNow.com. Tickets ranged in price from $299 to $525 and were scattered throughout the venue. Amy Coburn also tried and failed to buy tickets for herself and her friend online. “It‘s scalping, pure and simple,” said the 41-year-old real estate agent. “It‘s one thing for other companies or people to buy tickets and sell them online, because then everyone gets a fair chance to get their hands on the tickets. “But when you control the tickets, it‘s really unfair to hold some back and then sell them for three times the price. That‘s disgusting and it should be illegal.” Oughtred said the Bryan Adams tickets for sale at TicketsNow must have come straight from Ticketmaster, as they were on the resell website “two minutes after the tickets went on sale.”
Albert Lopez, spokesperson for Ticketmaster, said Ticketmaster does own the website, but is not doing anything illegal, nor is the company holding tickets back to sell at a higher price. “It‘s a bit of a misconception,” said Lopez. “We run the site, but all of the tickets are being sold by licensed brokers. We absolutely do not hold tickets back. We are under a contract agreement with the artist to sell the tickets at a certain price. “What Ticketsnow.com does do is offer customers a safe, guaranteed place to purchase resell tickets,” added Lopez, who used the example of 14 people in Vancouver being sold counterfeit tickets to the recent AC/DC concert on free classified website Craigslist. Lopez said ticket resells are not illegal, and said the website is able to handle 140,000 ticket transactions an hour, which is why resell tickets went up to the site so quickly after the Kelowna concert sold out. Coburn said she doesn‘t like the practice and thinks Ticketmaster shouldn‘t be in a position to allow people to resell their own tickets.“I guess there‘s a market for it, but it still makes me upset. I think Ticketmaster should sell its tickets once and then stay out of it.”
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