Ticketmaster and dynamic pricing

The only way to tackle it is to not buy the tickets en masse. It's the same with flights or hotel rooms, don't buy the tickets and then eventually the prices comes down.

But you know what the problem with that is.

The queue position on big events isnt random.

There is an algorithm, certain accounts are given priority, these are called Fire accounts and there is a market for the buying and selling of these.

Other accounts are sent to the back of the queue and the rest are randomised.

I'm in two minds about dynamic pricing. I fully agreed that the Oasis situation was a complete sh*tshow. But I lived in London for a year and used to attend countless theatre shows and their pricing was often dynamic-y.

I never really felt THAT put out by it. They were priced by the seat and more often than not I'd go for the cheap seats. At the weekends you'd pay a premium. The week of, you could get caught for a massive rise or drop in tickets. All very transparent. It would remind you of airline tickets. Everyone knows the story.

I don't think the two are directly comparable and I wouldn't call your theatre example dynamic-y. You are correct that prices are different depending on weekday/weekend and where you would sit in the theatre. But they don't fluctuate depending on demand.

It's similar for venues like National Concert Hall: I just bought a ticket for a concert and selected the most expensive band that came to 32 euro - so i can be in a "better" seat. That price has been standard throughout the sale. If I thought this was too expensive, I could have selected a different "worse" seat for 20 or 25 euro. Again, no fluctuation on prices... plus I got to select my seat (naturally I understand that selecting your seats for a big gig at Croke Park isn't practical)

An artist paints a picture, they decide to sell it for 10,000 euro. Some pays it. They got the price they wanted.

Where is the dynamic pricing? You opening paragraph makes no sense.

If a picture artist makes a painting they should be allowed to set the price and sell to the highest bidder. Fans of the artist have no right to complain that they were priced out of owning a piece themselves.

The same goes for concerts. The artist should be free to set the entry price to their shows and charge as mush as people are willing to pay.

Once everyone is informed, why shouldn't they have that right?

Tickets were advertised here as "From €86". I wouldn't say they were misinformed. Tickets were indeed from that price.

Its like when Ryanair advertise their sales and say "Flights as low as €19.99" but you might find the flight you want is €60. Or when you go into a shop that has sales "up to 50%", you might find the top you want is only 20% off.

The wording is clear enough that not all the tickets are €86. Now perhaps there is a push to be more clear what the price range is, but I wouldn't say there is anything misleading as the word "From" makes it quite clear.

Come off it. Grand, set a price, tell everyone, let them decide if they fancy it. Let's not pretend that that's what happened at the weekend.

Simple solution. Have a dynamic element of the queue page show the estimated tickets remaining at each price slot that constantly updates.

So you might be 10,000 from top of the queue and see that only €200+ tickets remain. Up to you then to decide whether to stay in the queue or not, and gives you more time to decide too.

There isn't a chance in hell that ticketmaster would do this without being forced to though.

cause the amount of dynamic tickets is minuscule for an event. No issue keeping them high until week of the show

But that is never going to be an entirely accurate reflection of how many tickets of a specific cost are left at a specific point in time (until the point in time where they are literally all gone)

I honestly don't think it would change anything for those that have a cost in their head and aren't going to go above it no matter what the situation - as should be the case for any right thinking individual - have a budget set - stick to it.

Based on the capacity issues they had at the weekend and for really high deman gigs in general adding something like that may or may not be accurate anyway.

I think you have 3 minutes to select the tickets and then another 3 to make the payment... something like that.

Just to say Ticketmaster are now literally completely uncontactable. I sold two tickets for Thomas Dolby gigs in the UK within the last month that I couldn't travel to. I sold them via TM. TM have said they've tried to pay me and to update my bank details, I've done this. Still no payment and receiving emails that they can't pay me. Went into the online chat on Monday morning and received an email I'd be contacted within 24 hours. Nothing, nada. EMailed back and still nothing. No other way of contacting them.

I dunno, six minutes should be plenty time to decide and pay if you are going in there with a budget in mind surely even if you weren't aware of what might have been available prior to getting to the top of the queue?

More time given means longer queues possibly?

Pressure tactics - no one is forced to buy a ticket. Many of us here had the opportunity to buy tickets at rates we deemed excessive/outside of our budget - did the pressure tactics work on us?

There definitely wasn't 42 minutes of people paying face value.

A friend of mine was around 7000 in the queue and it dropped rapidly for him. He got to the ticket purchase after approx 15 minutes. No face value tickets left only "in demand" ones, which lets face it are normal tickets at an inflated cost.

He said he wouldn't pay the amount they wanted, and to be fair I don't blame him.

I was somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 in the queue and got two face value tickets. So there definitely was. At 8.42am (as per my e-mail receipt).

Pressure tactics - no one is forced to buy a ticket. Many of us here had the opportunity to buy tickets at rates we deemed excessive/outside of our budget - did the pressure tactics work on us?

Fair enough, it doesn't work on you, well done.

You can surely realise however that it does work on some people, right?

Introduce a new graduated tax system for event tickets. 0% up to 50 quid, then 30% on the excess up to 100 quid, then 50% on the excess up to 150 quid, and then 90% over that. That's the general idea. Modify your price points as necessary.

Of course they work on some people and not others but suggesting outlawing pressure tactics is daft. They're everywhere in life.

I don't think that anyone could argue that the somewhat limited amount of time you have to buy/select and the complete the purchase of a ticket doesn't put some modicum of pressure on anyone who wants to buy a ticket. It's an inherent pressure though in some regards because you understandably can't let someone put a ticket in their basket and give them a half an hour to decide.

But people are responsible adults. And we're talking about a concert ticket here. People need to take responsibility for their financial decisions and stop whinging that they were somewhat forced into buying tickets (I'm not saying you're one of those people). And the Oasis thread was full of people who made a decision that the ticket price was too high and walked away.

In any event, if you buy the ticket and afterwards realise that you overpaid (versus your budget) or didn't actually want to spend that money - the facility is there to get the ticket refunded within 24 hours. I've done it plenty of times and never had any issues getting my money back.