Sarasota venues combatting fraudulent ticket sales to protect patrons

As manager of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall box office, Jan Schmall has seen patrons break down in tears when they realize they might have been scammed by online ticket sellers or paid far more than needed for tickets to shows they wanted to see.

“We have people crying all the time. Many times, elderly people who aren’t internet savvy feel like we tricked them” because they purchased tickets from a site other than Van Wezel’s own online ticketing system, Schmall said.

Van Wezel and Asolo Repertory Theatre are two Sarasota theaters that are trying to fight back against an increasing number of third-party ticket sellers – websites offering tickets at far higher prices than what is available from the theaters’ own sites. The Sarasota Opera has had problems in past seasons, but not lately, said General Director Richard Russell.

One day in January, one site listed a ticket in row 12 of the Van Wezel for a performance of “Hamilton” for more than $1,200, while the theater’s top price for premium seats is $289. At the end of the month, another site offered two tickets in row 10 for a Saturday night performance for $1,287 each.

Such sites impact perceptions about the actual ticket prices being offered by the venues themselves. In some cases, they could be illegal.

“I hate the fact that our ticket prices get inflated above the market value we have set on them,” said Mary Bensel, executive director of the Van Wezel. "People get very confused and I think it hurts us dramatically. People say to me all the time, ‘Your tickets are way too expensive. I can’t afford to go to the show.’ We’ll argue and then look it up and it’s always a price on a site other than ours. We can only say 450,000 times that you should go to the official Van Wezel website.”

Officials at Asolo Repertory Theatre face similar problems, though with less extreme price swings, especially during the run of a hit like the fall musical “Crazy for You.”

The problem has only increased since the pandemic, said Ross Egan, managing director of Asolo Rep.

“During the pandemic, there was a lull because there were no tickets to buy, but it’s come back with a vengeance,” he said.

Theater managers encourage patrons to use their own venue websites, such as VanWezel.org and AsoloRep.org. Audience members are more likely to discover inflated prices if they search for a theater venue or a particular show rather than go directly to the specific site, for example entering “Hamilton tickets Sarasota" in the search bar. “Usually during some search functionality, the first spots you find are paid links to these third-party sites,” Egan said.

Florida law prohibits selling tickets issued by non-profit organizations for more than $1 over the original price.

“If they sell them for more than that, they are liable to the state for treble damages,” said Tom McLaughlin, general counsel for Asolo Rep. “Other states have similar statutes. New York has gone after ticket resellers and actually received damages for ticket reselling.”

Most tickets sold by non-profits have the Florida statute printed on them.

McLaughlin, who said the theater has had some success in limiting third-party sellers through cease-and-desist letters, said he is not aware of any prosecutions in Florida to this point, but the theater and others have been talking with state legislators and hoping to get into discussions with the attorney general’s office about the problem.

The problem, however, is that once one site is taken down another pops up. “It’s like playing Whac-A-Mole and it can be hard to keep up,” Egan said.

Dynamic pricing

Some patrons may be confused by ticket prices because of the growing number of theaters that use dynamic pricing, which means ticket prices may go up for shows that are in high demand. But most non-profit theaters limit the variance.

“We do set limits on dynamic pricing. The max we will ever go is 10 percent over the original prices,” Egan said. “We’re a non-profit and yes we want to do well to make sure we continue to provide the best quality theater in Sarasota, but as a community-based arts organization, we believe everyone should be able to see the shows we present.”

In some cases, people associated with third-party sellers buy actual seats from specific theaters and then put them up for sale at higher prices on other sites, just as any ticket buyer can do with a variety of widely available websites like StubHub.com, which Schmall said guarantees its tickets and provides support for customers.

But Schmall and Bensel said many sites don’t always have actual tickets to sell. The high prices being requested may be to cover the costs of the site’s effort to acquire the desired seats, but that doesn’t mean the patron will ever get them.

Hit shows like “Hamilton,” which has a two-week run in Sarasota, tend to trigger more ticket frenzy, and its producers set prices and rules for how many tickets individuals may buy. Not long after the acclaimed musical opened on Broadway, reseller sites were offering tickets for $800 or more, far more than what might be difficult to get at the more traditional box office.

Last week, producers increased the prices of the limited number of “Hamilton” tickets remaining in Sarasota and being sold by the Van Wezel box office.

Bensel said the third-party sellers may not indicate that the two seats a patron buys are on opposite sides of the theater. “Or if a show cancels, we send emails out to all our ticket buyers,” Bensel said. “But the third-party site doesn’t pass that on to a person who bought a ticket and they show up for a canceled show and get mad at us.”

Egan said the United States Senate has advanced the Fans First Act, a bipartisan bill that requires sellers to disclose full ticket prices and fees, where the seats are located and whether the ticket is coming from a primary seller (like the Van Wezel or Asolo Rep) or from a reseller.

Egan said it is part of the aftermath that erupted when tickets for Taylor Swift concerts first went on sale, causing systems to crash. "If they start cracking down on music, and we're adjacent to music, we can find space in that bill to be able to deal with some of these problems,” Egan said.

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: How to avoid overpaying for theater tickets in Sarasota venues