Every year we seem to get more and more ticket brokers (aka ticket scalpers) buying up our cheapest seats online. We're not yet into single ticket sales for the 1920 season and today found four "different" non-local constituent records that all had fishy sounding email addresses and had purchased four each of the same subscription (cheapest seats) plus two different add-on performances of Nutcracker (again cheapest seats). We have a very limited number of low price seats and these four constituents purchased almost half of them for the shows in their packages. The scalpers then sell these $29 tickets for over $200 each, which goes against our goal of making ballet accessible to all. They also tend to promote our Family Series shows that have Disney titles (e.g., Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin) as though they're the Broadway Disney musicals which, at minimum, annoys patrons because they're not Disney versions at all.
I'm trying to figure out how to eliminate/reduce the number of scalpers who are buying online under the radar, but am not sure how to block IP addresses from buying through TNEW. It's so easy to create phony emails, that the minute I delete one login, the scalpers create another. My inclination is to try contacting the constituents to confirm/refute my scalper suspicions. Assuming we confirm they're scalpers, I'd like to return their tickets and prevent them from purchasing more.
How do you prevent situations like this online? What do you do after the fact? Thanks for your insight!
Sara
Hi Sara,
If someone posts a sure-fire solution, I will buy them dinner at the next TLCC (ok, TLCC2020 because I am not coming this summer). We run into the exact issues that you are outlining here, especially for big name productions like The Nutcracker and next seasons Swan Lake. We've put some things into place, but nothing is 100% fool-proof (heck we even catch them buying group sales). Some things we have done:
1.) Print at home is now a benefit of subscribing, because those tickets are seated by box office we have more control as to who they get sent to.
2.) We don't mail tickets to PO Boxes unless we have verified you are not a ticket broker
3.) Our box office staff does do a lot of outbound calling/emails (especially when single tickets go on sale, or after a big sale like cyber monday) to persons with suspicious addresses, emails, or accounts to confirm they are not brokers, and we do return tickets if we conclude they are brokers, and then we tag their accounts as such in Tessitura.
4.) We also have wording on our site about brokers and about only buying from us, we encourage patrons who call and complain that they purchased tickets from ticket brokers at an exorbitant price to report the brokers to the state.
5.) We have held back lower priced seats to try and discourage the brokers from buying them all up and release them at various points
The worst is, that they buy up the lower priced seats, effectively taking away the ability for some families to attend these performances, they are a complete scourge and I hate them.
Cheers,
Michaela