To avoid ticket-gouging, buy from venue websites
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Nov. 27—Where you buy your concert and theater tickets can cost you — sometimes a lot more than the face value.
A pair of $39 balcony seats for the Charles Dickens' classic "A Christmas Carol" last Friday at Manchester's Palace Theatre would have cost $86 total, including fees, if purchased on the Palace's website.
If buyers used another website not connected with the Manchester theater, they might have paid $216.95 for the same tickets.
The Palace, along with other venues around the state, report dealing with complaints about their tickets being sold on third-party websites at inflated prices.
"We've had a handful of calls over the last week where people unfortunately realize it later or after they made a purchase," said Shannon Sullivan, the theater's director of corporate and community partnerships. "More of our events are showing up on these third-party sites."
The inflated prices sometimes are hundreds of dollars over face value, Sullivan said.
Customers searching online for tickets to The Palace Theatre and The Music Hall in Portsmouth may get confused when third-party sites are listed first on Google.
Employees at The Music Hall have seen tickets that cost too much or were counterfeit.
"I don't think it's exponentially worse for us this year, but it's certainly as people have started to come back to see shows, there are certainly a percentage that are getting scammed in this way," said Monte Bohanan, director of communications and community engagement.
"Either they're paying an exorbitant amount for a show where we actually have tickets for sale at more reasonable prices or they're counterfeit tickets," Bohanan said.
The Portsmouth venue doesn't spot counterfeit tickets every week, but "we see them with some regularity," he said.
"The last thing we want is someone to pay five or 10 times the amount of a ticket and have a bad experience and never want to come back to the theater and think it's on us," he said.
California??
Buying tickets from the venue makes it more likely that the venue can fix ticket problems when customers try to use them, Bohanan said.
At the Palace, "in the last year it has really ramped up," said Katie Lovell, box office manager/rental coordinator.
These third-party websites buy tickets from the Palace to resell or to fill orders for customers and "charge them an insane amount," Lovell said.
Lovell said the box office sometimes sees ticket orders with a California address from third-party sites buying tickets on the Palace website.
"You don't really see many people coming in from California (to our shows)," Lovell said. "You look up the address and it's for a house for sale."
The website charging $217 for the pair of "A Christmas Carol" tickets said on its site that it "is not affiliated with any box office or venue. The site displays resale marketplace tickets. Prices are set by sellers and may be above or below face value."
Anyone stopping by the Palace box office in person could buy those two tickets for $78 total with no added service fees.
Lovell said customers taken in by the third-party sites aren't from one age group.
A "tech-savvy" thirtysomething person recently paid more for tickets from a third-party site, she said.
