Hot tickets

With the music festival season already under way, how can venues and festival organisers help protect customers from the scourge of online secondary ticketing sites?

Sheku Kanneh-Mason performs at the Last Night of the Proms 2023

MARK ALLAN/BBC

This summer’s BBC Proms festival, which begins on 19 July, has already enjoyed record-breaking online ticket sales, with 103,000 tickets sold on the opening day of booking. All the seats for 15 Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall (RAH) were sold out within two days. Professional ticket resellers were quick to try to exploit the demand, with hundreds of BBC Proms ticket listings going up on secondary ticketing websites such as StubHub, Viagogo and Gigsberg, and some traders listing tickets at many times their face value. A Google search for ‘BBC Proms tickets’ brought up resale giant Viagogo as the top, sponsored result. Two days after ticket sales opened, Viagogo was listing a Gallery standing ticket (worth £8) for the evening Doctor Who Prom on 28 August for £255 and stalls tickets (with a face value of £70) for Florence + The Machine – Symphony of Lungs on 11 September at £2,683 each.

Aside from such blatant profiteering, tickets appearing on unauthorised outlets are sometimes listed speculatively, meaning they have not actually been purchased. The BBC Proms terms and conditions make it clear that anyone buying a resold ticket risks being refused entry, and a Proms spokesperson says: ‘The BBC absolutely condemns secondary selling. The RAH is the only official ticket seller for the BBC Proms concerts taking place there. Tickets bought from third-party providers may be fraudulent, and we do not want our audiences to be disappointed.’ But beyond issuing clear T&Cs, what can venues and promoters do to protect ticket buyers from being ripped off or becoming victims of fraud, and at the same time make it easy for ticketholders who can no longer attend an event to resell or exchange tickets?

Though the BBC Proms will only consider offering refunds ‘in exceptional circumstances’, ticketholders can exchange their ticket for another BBC Proms event, providing they do so more than ten days before the Prom that they can no longer attend. The organisers point out that returns are often available through the box office and that no Prom is ever completely sold out until the day of the event, as up to 1,000 Promming tickets – for standing in the Arena or Gallery – are released on the day. The RAH’s standard ticketing policy does not allow for purchased tickets to be exchanged or refunded, but ticketholders can resell their tickets through its official resale partner Twickets, a fan-to-fan site where unwanted tickets can be sold for no more than face value (plus fees).

The RAH, like the BBC Proms, warns prospective buyers not to purchase tickets from unauthorised secondary websites, and a RAH spokesperson says: ‘We have no way of knowing whether listings on Viagogo are speculative, listed with the wrong seat details, or simply fraudulent. We do report anything clearly fraudulent to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and get listings removed, but the sheer volume of tickets appearing on these sites, where we have no visibility of the validity of tickets, makes this a huge challenge for us. We have, in the past, cancelled tickets when they appear on third-party websites, only to discover that the tickets have been listed with incorrect details, and so we have cancelled valid tickets, leading to very disappointed customers.’

‘We have cancelled valid tickets, leading to very disappointed customers’

Besides going through secondary ticketing sites in search of fraudulent listings, the RAH is exploring tech-focused strategies in its fight against unauthorised reselling. ‘We are speaking to an e-ticket supplier that uses dynamic barcodes,’ says the spokesperson, ‘which means that you can track the ticket when it’s transferred, and turn off the option to transfer, when appropriate.’ The venue also supports calls for stronger legislation and enforcement powers in the sector. In March this year, Labour leader Keir Starmer said that a future Labour government would cap resale prices, limit the number of tickets people can resell, make platforms more accountable for the accuracy of information about tickets they list, and give the CMA the powers it needs to take swift action against platforms and touts. The RAH spokesperson says: ‘We very much welcome the proposal to restrict the resale of tickets at more than a small, set percentage over the price the original purchaser paid, which would effectively make touting much less appealing.’

In May 2023 the UK’s Conservative government rejected recommendations that the CMA made in 2021 for stronger laws to protect consumers from rogue ticket traders. In Ireland, by contrast, the Sale of Tickets Act, which came into force in 2021, banned the reselling of tickets above face value. ‘To protect UK consumers in this market properly, we need stronger laws,’ says Adam Webb, campaign manager at FanFair Alliance, which advocates for a total ban on reselling of tickets for profit while at the same time ensuring music fans have access to viable capped, consumer-friendly resale services. ‘An intervention in the market, like in Ireland, would make the whole reselling process less confusing for consumers, and would provide the clarity the ticketing platforms need to behave in an ethical, moral and legal way. Once the clarity is there in law, I think technology will at some stage take over, making the process easier and less dependent on terms and conditions because they will be built into the ticket as a digital product.’ As well as pushing for legislative action, FanFair Alliance wants the live music industry to market capped, consumer-friendly ticket resale more proactively, and for platforms such as Google and YouTube to do more to help direct consumers towards legitimate ticket sources.