Ticketmaster and dynamic pricing

They literally weren't told anywhere tickets were 80 quid. The first place ticketmaster showed the price was once you get out of the queue at which point you are presented with a range of options and you could then add the ticket(s) to the basket. Perhaps it should be mandatory to disclose that dynamic pricing is turned on. I think it should be mandatory to disclose al ticket options before the sale, but you can't really ban it without costs going up elsewhere.

There were a number of advertisements where the tickets were said to be priced "from 89.50*" but yes, it would be beneficial to have all the various tiers of ticket costs outlined prior to the tickets sale going live. I am not sure what exactly it would change in this situation however.
I was ok to pay around €120 a ticket for a seated ticket (I was after 4 seated tickets). Were there ever seated tickets for sale at that price - from what I can tell, probably not, unless you were seated behind a pillar or stage. So when I was presented with standing tickets for 415 that was me out, no matter how long I queued.

If you told me before hand that the cheapest seated ticket with a view was approx €200 euro, I probably wouldn't have bothered getting involved. So in that case I can see that the lack of a pricing structure defo added to the hype - but at the end of the day, it was my own decision whether I ultimately bought a ticket - no one elses.

I suppose the thing is - with the weekend, no matter HOW you did it, a significant amount of people would be dissappointed, that doesn't mean things couldn't have been done better.

But even in the instance where ticket prices were published prior to the gig - just say the example I gave above. There were seats available to €120 (as well as other tiered ticket prices).

I log on, join the queue, knowing there are seats available at the price I am willing to pay. Get to the top of the queue - there's not seats available for that price (they've all been sold already) - should I blame TM or anyone else, if I then decide to purchase one of the more expensive tickets that I have been presented with?

Wrong.

There were over 10,000 dynamically priced tickets for each of the Manchester gigs, another 5k platinum.

It might not be entirely accurate, but should help with the shock when price is displayed.

Side note - how long does the timer run once tickets are made available to you before you lose them?

Maybe another helping thing could be that as the price goes up, the time you have to make the decision also goes up? Again, ticketmaster won't do this on their own and would need to be instructed to.

Basically we should have systems in place that prevent these sort of pressure tactics that obviously work.

Yes they intentionally removed their phoneline during Covid so as to make it as akward as possible for people seeking refunds for postponed events to contact them.

Must be the only ticket company in the world without a phoneline.

Imagine if Aer Lingus or Irish Rail had no phone line.

and reality of pressure is if those tickets weren’t dynamic they would have been “vip or platinum” as similar crazy prices and people would have had same decision to make in same time frame.

Surely this in itself is a breach of consumer standards.

It was on that consumer programme on tv where it took the programme to get money for tickets which had been resold by TM

Apparently the issue was that the payment could not be applied to the customers CC because of a different BIC and IBAN ?

Of course the customer was never told this in all the to and fro emails for 18 months !

I've managed to track down a registered office for the Irish branch, it's in Dublin 2. If I hear nothing by tomorrow it will be old fashioned letter and snail mail.

Yeah but you can't say there was 42 minutes of face value tickets. The entire Ticketmaster regime is a lottery.

There was over 571 thousand people ahead of me in the queue and I logged on the instant it opened. Some people were low in the queue and only got offered "in demand" tickets. Others were high in the queue and picked up the regular priced ones.

Ticketmaster have no transparency at all. We have no idea (and probably never will) how they decided who got what.

They are a vile organisation, truly revolting.

They use a company called Adyen to process resale payments and they have alot of unecessary red tape.

A friend of mine had terrible issues getting paid out, he threatened to turn up at their office in Dublin and they eventually paid him after leading him up the garden path for months.

They have no problem taking the money but they dont want to pay it back.

Ive no idea why they cant refund the payment to the card used to make the purchase like other companies.

There was no great conspiracy on who got access to what. The higher up the queue you were, you were more likely to get face value tickets. The lower in the queue you were, you were more likely the be in the position where only platinum/in-demand tickets were. That part is no secret.

I do agree that nobody knows whether there were 5,000 face value tickets and 155,000 in-demand priced tickets, or only 5,000 in-demand tickets and 155,000 face value tickets. Nobody knows. Generally the amount of in-demand or platinum tickets is relatively low. On Boards, I only saw one poster say they bought an in-demand ticket whereas everyone else seemed to get face-value tickets. Limited sample of course.

Okay, it sounds like you accept that this process does place pressure on potential buyers but you think it's a fair level of pressure to apply?

Personally, I disagree - I can't think of a single other example where a person queues for ages to buy something (and the time sunk here makes a big difference IMO), finds out the price when they get to the top of the queue and then has to decide in a matter of minutes whether or not they want to buy or not.