Friday 16 May 2014

ASA rejects ticketing complaint against Ticketmaster

The Advertising Standards Authority has rejected a complaint against Ticketmaster UK, which accused the company of misleading customers by saying that it had tickets for The Cure's Royal Albert Hall show on 28 Mar, while actually directing fans towards more expensive tickets on it's own secondary ticking site, Get Me In.
CMU Daily reports that the complainant said that they had logged onto the Ticketmaster website in time for when tickets went on sale for the Cure show at 9.30am on the 31st January. However, despite repeated searches, they were never offered tickets directly, and instead given the option of going to Get Me In.  In 2009 in the US Ticketmaster faced a Federal Trade Commission investigation and an angry Bruce Springsteen after fans buying tickets for two of his gigs in New Jersey via his official ticket agent - Ticketmaster - were pointed towards the TicketsNow website (that being Ticketmaster's US secondary ticketing website), where tickets for said gigs were being sold at a mark up, even before Ticketmaster's allocation of normal priced tickets had sold out.

This time the complainant inferred that Ticketmaster itself may have listed at least some of its tickets for the concert onto its secondary site before anyone had had a chance to buy them on the primary site. In response, Ticketmaster pointed out that it only had a certain allocation of all the primary tickets on offer for the show, with various other outlets also selling them, and that demand meant that 90% were sold by 9.45am. The remaining 10%, data provided to the ASA showed, were at that time reserved in other customers' shopping baskets, meaning that they were temporarily unavailable for purchase (the site holding tickets for fifteen minutes before returning them to general sale if they are not bought). The company added that as well as suggesting users go to the Get Me In website to see if any tickets were available there, it also recommended that customers search the main Ticketmaster site multiple times to check if tickets previously reserved in another customer's virtual basket had become available again.  However, the vast majority of primary tickets for that particular show were gone by 10am.

The ASA said it was happy that the Cure tickets available on Get Me In were being offered by various resellers, and not Ticketmaster itself.


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