Not quite sure what inspires me to write this, but here’s a hypothetical way for you to make a small fortune:
Suppose a hugely popular international rock band, lets call them WWII Submarine, had just announced a word tour that was set to play around 110 dates, most of which would be in huge sports stadia and arenas with capacities in 5 figures, but guaranteed to sell out quickly.
Now suppose you ran a ticket agency with a virtual monopoly on major gig ticket sales (lets call them, oh I don’t know, Ticket King) and a policy of slapping huge “booking fees” on top of any sales. Well now, you’d be able to charge what you like, wouldn’t you? Does £26 to print and mail four small pieces of paper sound reasonable to you, for example?
Now here’s some simple arithmetic:
£26/4 = £6.50 per ticket x 50,000 (guess, average) x 110 (roughly). That’s rather a lot of money, isn’t it?
Of course I had no problem paying this this morning to secure my tickets for their Twickenham date later this year, because my money worries are over: last week I received a letter from Transport for London apologising profusely for a mistake on the Oystercard system that had resulted in my being overcharged for a journey I made at the start of the month, and enclosing a cheque for a full refund of the amount. The only problem is, I’m just not sure I can cash a cheque for “no pounds and twenty pence only” with a straight face.
Does this mean you’ve already bought U2 tickets – I thought they went on sale on Friday? Are you a member of the special U2 mailing list??
Yes, I have already bought U2 tickets. I’m special, see… Or at least I paid to join the fanclub so I could take advantage of the “presale” ticket offer, which started on Tuesday morning. So we’re going to see them at Twickers. We might also try to go to the gig in Barcelona in August, but that depends on whether we can get tickets (that one hasn’t gone a sale/presale yet).
You are so wise – was deliberating joining the special people’s club, but decided to risk it. As a result I’ve just spent a very frustrating hour or two, hitting refresh and redial over and over again (Glastonbury flashback…) Couldn’t get Twickenham but managed to get 2 Manchester tickets for me and my friend Simon. At least I think I got 2, but as the system kept crashing on the point of ordering, I may have 4, or even 6! A new career as a ticket tout beckons….
Sorry to hear that. I did try to get into TM this morning out of interest, but I couldn’t get near it. It looks like standing for both Twickenham dates has sold out now.
The special club actually turned out not to be that good a deal after all, although I managed to get straight through at 10 on Tuesday, there were a lot of people who had trouble, and the system was setup particularly badly so that if the site timed out on you, then your “once only” secret presale code became locked and you couldn’t use it again. There’s a lot of angry fans out there (who have also had big problems this morning). If you’re interested, there’s a good summary of what happened here.
I’d offer to help you out, but unfortunately I used up my code getting 4 twickenham tickets, two of which are promised to someone who is going to use his 4 to try for Barcelona, whenever it goes on sale!
Reading about the fiasco of the presale tickets, I feel kind of triumphant at having got anything on the open market! Manchester is fine – it’s just a bit tricky that it’s on a Tuesday night. Good luck with Barcelona!