Solutions to touts.

Everyone here is always complaining about ticket touts, prices of tickets, etc.
It is fairly obvious that something must be done about the situation. But no-one seems to have a viable solution to touting.
They recently started to put barcodes on the tickets to prevent forged tickets from entering the concert, a good idea, but it was really for the promoter/artist's interest, not for the consumer.

Would it be possible to print a picture of the ticket holder on each ticket? Letting Ticketmaster actually justify the booking fee?
As more and more transactions occur on-line it wouldn't be that hard to upload a photo that would be printed on the ticket? The people queueing would be left alone and no picture required, as I believe if you've queued for 3 1/2 hours+ you deserve to be treated a little better than someone sitting at home with their plastic in hand...

Whatcha think?

kenmc

grand for the ticket buyer, but what about the friends/family they buy the ticket for. what happens if i get 4 tickets and give 2 to mates to meet me in the venue, rather than waiting around for them.
don't see how it could work tbh

edit - also how about internet/phone purchasing? all well in good taking a picture in ticketmaster/hmv, but thats about it.

Buy tickets for people who want to go when you buy them?
They're sent out to you as normal, so no "waiting around"
If you/someone else cancels on you, you send the tickets back, for an admin charge, they change the name/photo over. Preferable to touting, no?

rubadub

Papa Smut wrote:

Buy tickets for people who want to go when you buy them?
They're sent out to you as normal, so no "waiting around"
If you/someone else cancels on you, you send the tickets back, for an admin charge, they change the name/photo over. Preferable to touting, no?

sounds good to me, sort of like changing airline tickets (which are cheaper than concert tickets these days). You would need to either bring ID or else register with ticketmaster sending them a digital photo by email or going into an agent and register. Then your tickets are sent out with your photo and name on them.

Touting will still go on, as in buy and sell touting, people saying, just email me your name and photo, it would get rid of street corner touts (a bit). They will still sell box office tickets which can always be touted.

Bottle_of_Smoke

Wouldn't wanna see street corner touts gone completely though, I mean you always have a chance of going to a sold out gig with them there. They're not always the worst either, first tout gig I went to was feeder in the ambassador, tickets were €25 i paid €35, then at the frames in the olympia one night i paid €40 for a €30, then when the frames played vicar street I paid €15 for a €30 ticket, all about the timing.

Rhyme

I had a similar deal and at Oxegen last year i had forgotten my ID and with this baby face they werent going to let me in so i had all my plans laid out to sell it for enough money to get home... luckily no ID check and it was a great show...

...and everybody lived happily ever after

BaZmO*

Street corner touts aren't the problem. It's all the wánkers out there that buy up a load of tickets for a gig and about 3 seconds after the gig has sold out they have the tickets up on ebay selling them for 2 or 3 times the face value!

I reckon an easy solution would be for ticketmaster to ask the buyer when purchasing online what form of i.d. they are gonna use when going to a gig.
So say for example if you said passport, you would give them your passport number when buying online and this number would be printed on every ticket that you buy. And when going to the gig your passport would be used as i.d. for you and your friends.

And if at any stage before the gig you realised that you can't go, you could bring your tickets and your passport to a ticketmaster agent and for a small fee they could change the i.d. over to a friends i.d. number.

But this will never happen. The simple reason being that as far as the likes of ticketmaster are concern there is no problem. They're regulary selling out gigs at extortinate prices, so why would they change?

It's like RTE when they released that stupid reality show about the farm. A lot of people complained that the show was sh1te but they received some of the highest viewer ratings in history, so as far as they were concerned the show was a hit.

B.

comet

Concert Promoters have no interest in stopping touts, their only interest is in selling tickets.
Glastonbury this year has cut out the touts by only allowing UK purchases by debit card and using a photo ID system.

scargill

I think ticketmaster should be obliged to have a ticket office (or caravan) at each gig that facilitates the return of unwanted tickets.

Say, for example the ticket cost you €80 - you could walk up to ticket office, ticketmaster would buy it back from you for €75. Anyone going to a gig without a ticket could queue up at this and pay €80 for it. They could maybe restrict it to 1 ticket per person.

Advantages:
Bypasses the touts completely.
No-one gets fleeced

Disadvantages:
Loads of people turning up at gigs without tickets.

with the profits that ticketmaster make - for very little service - they should be made do this. Having said that - they'll probably stick a few more quid onto the price of each ticket for the inconvenience !!

Screw it, going back to my idea about photo's, Keep photo's on ALL tickets, if you can't go you send the full ticket back to ticketmaster, who give you a refund and they sell it on. No deals with mates, no touts, Hard but everyone who wants to go to the gig gets to go.

Andrew 83

I don't agree with that - far too time consuiming. For people without a credit card who buy at an outlet what do you do, take a photo there? Imagine how long that would take queuing in the morning for a gig about to sell out. It'd just mean that an even hgiher proportion of tickets in quick sell outs go to internet buyers - obviously discriminating against non credit card owners and people without internet access. And what about if you buy your tickets in Road or Sound Cellar? They have their own stashes of tickets they stamp. You wouldn't have a photo on them.

I think changing to that system would create more problems than it would solve.

I also agree that touting isn't always bad, if someone pulls out at the last minute from coming in a group at least you can recoup some of the money - ticketmaster don't do refunds and I don't see them deciding to start doing them.

I think a better step would be to reduce the number of tickets allowed to be bought at once per person from the what seems to be standard 6 down to maybe 3 or 4.

kenmc

Papa Smut wrote:

Screw it, going back to my idea about photo's, Keep photo's on ALL tickets, if you can't go you send the full ticket back to ticketmaster, who give you a refund and they sell it on. No deals with mates, no touts, Hard but everyone who wants to go to the gig gets to go.

what happens if someone get sick on the morning of the gig? or their granny dies - there are lots of reasons for short notice not being able to use tickets. at least with the current system you can give/sell them to a friend who can make use of them without any hassles.

Andrew 83

Andrew 83 wrote:

I think a better step would be to reduce the number of tickets allowed to be bought at once per person from the waht seems to be standard 6 down to maybe 3 or 4.

Which would mean touts lining up with their kids as they already do...

kenmc

kenmc wrote:

what happens if someone get sick on the morning of the gig? or their granny dies - there are lots of reasons for short notice not being able to use tickets. at least with the current system you can give/sell them to a friend who can make use of them without any hassles.

Simple, you send in the full ticket, get your refund 3-4 days later, someone else buys the ticket at/before the gig.

magpie

You want to stop touts? 1 ticket per person.

Unlike those corksuckers U2 who are actively promoting the hysteria caused by a sell-out by allowing 6 tickets per person. 1 for me, 1 for my g/f and 4 for ebay at €150 a pop.

karlh

why not just link the ticket to the person who bought it. pictures would cause too much hassle.

if ordered by credit card, the person has to produce the card with the ticket as they enter. if bought in person, it must match id details printed on the ticket.....name given over phone etc.

even a group going together would just have to go in with the ticket buyer or have their individual names printed on them and produce id.

they did it for glastonbury this year.

Chalk

forget tickets altogether,

you get a boooking number, you show up with your passport or garda id,
names dont match? feck off.

want a refund,
go to some secure website and enter the number you have, number is delted, money is returned.
instant, so you can refund up to say, 1 hr before gig,

dregin

best suggestion so far. That photo idea just wont work. It would be far too time/resource consuming.

Chalk

Chalk wrote:

forget tickets altogether,

you get a boooking number, you show up with your passport or garda id,
names dont match? feck off.

want a refund,
go to some secure website and enter the number you have, number is delted, money is returned.
instant, so you can refund up to say, 1 hr before gig,

Great idea, would also cut down underagers at shows.

magpie

Why limit it to 1 ticket per person when you can have a much more complicated system that does effectively the same thing involving booking number, passport etc etc etc.

Chalk

the way i suggested you could buy as many as you wanted as long as youn know the names of the poeple,
theres no way to change names, just a refund.

limit of one per person is about ridiculous,
exapmle,

parent wants to bring child+childs frined to westlife,
do the kids need their own credit cards?
or do you make them queue over night on jervis street?
or do you say to firneds parents,
im bringing them to a concert for my kids birthday,
btw queueing starts thursday evening about 4ish,
bring a sleeping bag

magpie

So you prove the child's identity with what exactly?

Why don't you have it so your DNA profile is encoded onto the ticket? You could provide a swab to ticketmaster who would then match it on entry into the concert. Anyone not having matching DNA could be automatically thrown into the toutmasher 2000.

Or you could limit ticket sales to 2 tickets per person (who says compromise is dead)

There's no need for anyone to be able to buy 4/6 tickets, certainly not for 'rock' concerts, and we're not talking about touting at Lion King on Ice here.

Chalk

fair enough,
most parents have there kids listed on the passport, do they not?
i doubt the touts are taking other peoples kids.

dna on a ticket is ridiculous, and probably unconstitutional.
maybe adult tickets and child tickets could be availble, no price difference, but adults ticket would have adult + 2 kids or some such, like a family rambler ticket

the 2 per transaction limit would work if that was the problem.

i thought a major problem was some that sort of script was beiong used that constantly bombarded ticketmaster site with reqiest for tickets,
if they sell six at a time the touts still get as many as if they sell 2 at a time, the process just lasts longer