Looking to buy concert tickets? Don’t make this expensive mistake
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — Concert tickets can be very expensive: They can set you back. But depending on how you buy those tickets — whether it’s through the venue, the venue’s authorized agent, or a third-party ticket broker — they can set you way back.
I learned that the hard way this week when I jumped into a pair of tickets to the December show in Bakersfield featuring the classic rock sister act known as Heart.
I googled “Heart tickets Bakersfield” and — without checking to see how deep the water was — went to the first website, the one at the top of the list. It happened to be a sponsored link to Tickets-Center.com, a brokerage that buys up tickets and re-sells them at massively inflated prices — so much so that the New York State Attorney General’s office has the company on a short leash.
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At least I am in good company. Check out some of these comments about Tickets-Center.com on the Better Business Bureau website, all from within the last six months.
Maria J. wrote, “I realized I paid $160/person for tickets that were $30.” Carol G. wrote: “They are nothing but a scam company. Stay away from them.” And Rodney C: “They are nothing but a scam. Just for the fun of it I looked elsewhere and saw there were plenty of tickets for the show. They made it seem like they were all gone. “
Nick Wynne, marketing manager at Mechanics Bank Arena, knows all about resale ticket agencies like this one. Not only can you pay way over the listed price, you may not get the tickets you ordered, or worse.
“These guys, they’re trying to imitate us,” he said. “And so people pay that rate, not necessarily because they think they want to get the better seats like you would if you went to StubHub or Cheap Seats or one of these places, but they pay them because they think that they’re us. And they end up paying a lot more than we would charge you at our box office.
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“Secondly, a lot of those companies are not exactly the best companies in terms of their business standards and complaints and that kind of thing. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had someone come up with duplicate tickets or tickets that are not the seats that they thought they purchased, and we looked it up and, sure enough, they bought them from one of these imitation websites online.”
Wynne’s solution? Go directly to the Mechanics Bank Arena website, or get the app of the arena’s authorized ticketing company, AXS.
The people at Bakersfield’s Fox Theater know all about this problem. They commissioned an animated ad urging customers to buy directly from the Fox Theater’s website. “Friends,” the ad says, “don’t let friends buy third-party tickets.”
The New York Attorney General would agree. They’ve looked into Tickets-Center.com and can’t even figure out where the company is based. Both the California State Assembly and U.S. Senate are considering bills that would tighten regulations on third-party ticketing agencies.
As Ann Wilson of Heart might say, you’d have to be crazy to buy from a fly by night resale ticketing company.
The good news is, it’s really, really easy to buy concert tickets. The bad news is, sometimes it’s a little too easy to buy concert tickets.
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