As the holiday season approaches, I am remind of the less than altruistic truth that others are eager to make money off your success..even if you don’t perceive yourself as successful.
Close to two years ago I wrote about a compliant I was called to the box office to address which turned out to be the result of another ticketing site masquerading as ours.
In the last day Thomas Cott tweeted a similar story about the Colorado Ballet’s Nutcracker tickets being bought up and sold at up to $1,100 for $155 tickets. In this particular instance, with tacked on fees, two tickets cost $3,000.
Even though the Ballet has received its money, the problem, as the Ballet’s ticketing manager says, is one of access.
Part of the problem comes when audiences can’t afford overinflated ticket prices and then stop considering going to the ballet altogether.
“We love supporting our community and we have our ticket prices set so that… every family that wants to come see The Nutcracker can,” Clark said.
This article was particularly timely because I recently noticed that the top Google results for our theater was a site with the pattern “theatrename.box-officetickets.com.” They are selling some of our events at 4.5 times the face value.
It isn’t just us. I did a little more searching with common theater names and Ohio Theatre in Columbus, Fox Theatre in Detroit and Bijou Theater in Knoxville all have sites with the same URL pattern that show up.
Lest you think that only big productions at famous venues are vulnerable, my theater is located in a rural area and the show in question two years ago was an Elvis impersonator. There was a good crowd scheduled to show up, but it was hardly the most heavily in demand event.
It doesn’t take much effort to check the Google results for the search terms including your theater name and location and see what shows up as selling your tickets. In addition to the theatername.box-officetickets.com address, I have also seen theatername.ticketofficesales.com as a common site names. I am sure there are others.
It can be good to remind potential and existing customers of the official ticket outlets. The fact that these are not the official websites are quickly apparent to many people, but to those not accustomed to navigating the internet and purchasing things online, it isn’t as clear.
At the prices some of these places are charging, all it takes is just a couple of people making purchases to make it worth their while.
N.B. In the comments, Marc Fleming shares a link to a video the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust created to combat this issue.
In Pittsburgh, we have seen a rising number of problems with an increasingly aggressive secondary ticket market. We are rolling out an education campaign and just produced a video to help promote the advantages of buying from official ticket sources:
http://trustarts.org/events/official-ticket-source/
That is a great video. I like how it reinforced buying from the trust with support for local arts.
Also, I like the trustarts.org address which has a subtle message all its own. Is that recent? I knew some people that worked for the Trust before and I don’t remember that being their email address.
Thanks Joe for your comments on the video. We cut it down to 30 and 60 second spots as well but I like the long form because it drives home that when you buy from the official source you are supporting the arts and getting all the benefits from buying direct.
Good eye on the domain name change. It coincided with a branding campaign that was started in 2008 to help turn a point of confusion, our name being the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, to more of an action verb to trust us to deliver great arts and entertainment, education programs, stimulate the local economy, etc. Before it was pgharts.org, which no one outside Pittsburgh would get.
Yeah, I am from upstate NY so even though I should know better, every single time I see PGH, I think of Poughkeepsie first.