A public consultation into secondary ticketing sites needs your views
The Department Of Culture, Media & Sport, as required by the Consumer Rights Act, has opened a public consultation to get your opinion on secondary selling tickets sites like StubHub and Seatwave.
At first look, the idea seems sound: take your unsold tickets and use the platforms to sell them back to your fellow music fan.
However, this isn’t always how the system works.
Back in 2012, Channel 4’s Dispatches found that one of the biggest sites of this kind, Viagogo, is handed large portions of tickets straight from promoters, giving ordinary fans no chance to buy them and selling them straight back to you at inflated prices. Seems unfair to us, especially when those prices can be up to ten times more expensive than they should be.
As a representative of Viagogo said in 2012, “…it is really fucking shady, we are making a lot more money than we ever should on this.”
There’s loud opposition to ticket tour reform over in Government too. Tory MP Philip Davies thinks that “needless intervention is not the answer and will only serve to drive many consumers away from safe online platforms and into the arms of street touts”, and has been filibustering questionable debates since he came to be the Conservative MP for Shipley in 2005.
You might want to act fast: this is the last chance you’ll have for the next six years to have your opinion counted.
Dice have made it easy to mail the government with your views on the unfair use of these sites. Use their form over on Fans First to make your thoughts known.