Rocio says: With brighter days finally here and the festival season on the horizon, attention for many consumers will turn to securing tickets to see their favourite acts.
Lots of fans eager to see them would have accepted the reality that demand might outstrip supply and that they might miss out. That’s the nature of the beast.
One of the most shocking elements of this debacle was that customers weren’t warned that prices could increase.
We shared our findings with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the regulator in charge of ensuring markets work fairly, and raised concerns that consumer law had potentially been breached.
The CMA said Ticketmaster may have breached consumer protection laws in two key ways. First, by claiming some seated tickets were “platinum” and then selling them for “nearly 2.5 times the price of equivalent standard tickets”, without explaining sufficiently that they “did not offer additional benefits”, giving the impression that these tickets were superior.
This meant lots of customers were left to wait in a lengthy queue “without understanding what they would be paying and then having to decide whether to pay a higher price than expected”.
But this will be of little comfort to Oasis fans who will, quite rightly, look back in anger. Many will have felt they had no choice but to stump up lots more cash for a ticket that would have been half the price just hours earlier.
This should be a cautionary tale. The Government, for its part, should look at the ticketing market more widely – and not let the opportunity to reform it in favour of customers slide away.
Rocio Concha is Which? director of policy and advocacy at which.co.uk. If you have a question for this column, email: business@inews.co.uk
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