Examination of Witnesses (Questions 51-59)
MR NICK
BLACKBURN, MR
JONATHAN BROWN,
MR TOM
WRIGHT, MR
CHRIS EDMONDS
AND MR
PAUL WILLIAMSON
26 JUNE 2007
Chairman: We now move on to the primary
ticket agencies and can I welcome Paul Williamson and Chris Edmonds,
representing Ticketmaster UK, and Tom Wright, who is here for
the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers with Jonathan Brown,
and Nick Blackburn, Managing Director of Seetickets.
Q51 Rosemary McKenna: Good morning,
gentlemen. Can you persuade us that your service is the best one?
Mr Wright: Absolutely, is the
answer. We have 32 million visitors to this country. We have a
huge £85 billion visitor economy and the events industry
is a huge part of that. We need to give confidence to people all
over the world and domestically that they can buy tickets with
confidence. They can come to STAR members and have absolute confidence
about the tickets they are buying, that we refund if there are
any issues of cancellation, they know where they are going to
sit, all those fine details which are critically important. We
are about tickets for confidence and the consumer deserves that
from the ticket industry. That is what STAR and its members deliver.
Mr Williamson: The key thing which
we bring is that we are selling authorised tickets on behalf of
the event owner or the artist. We are selling them directly to
the public, we are selling them with reasonable booking fees based
on our costs of doing business, not based upon the perception
of how hot that show is or how hot that act is. We are selling
365, we are selling 24/7 and we are investing millions and millions
of pounds to enable us to sell online, have phone rooms through
the night, so that we can offer customer service to all the customers
out there for a wide range of events.
Mr Blackburn: The other thing
as well is we protect the customer's money. We have had events
which have been cancelled and we have refunded the money straight
away, which, as Harvey Goldsmith said in the previous meeting,
would not happen with a lot of the secondary market operators.
I have something here which I have pulled off the Internet and
it could apply to any of the secondary market; it could apply
to eBay or it could apply to viagogo but it is a Seatwave event
and it is a Joseph ticket, which is one of the theatres we own.
It is a £15 ticket where they claim the face value is £18.90.
The £15 tickets are in the back rows of the upper circle.
They are the worst seats in the house. That is not described.
There is no map of where the tickets are. Joseph has attracted
a new audience because of the TV show of people who are not used
to going to the theatre, and they are selling these tickets for
£352.88. I think it is a tout who has put them up on Seatwave,
which is just a marketplace like eBay. This is an old trick of
touts, to buy the cheap tickets and make out they are better tickets
than they are. There is no map so the customer has no chance of
seeing where he is sitting, whereas if you come to us or to Ticketmaster,
you can see exactly what you are buying. This is what is going
on all the time. There are millions of examples of this. The customer
is being deceived. A new customer to the theatre would not know
where the upper circle is. These are the last two rows in the
theatre. £352.88 for four tickets, service charge from Seatwave
of £52.88, processing fee for the tickets £75 each.
It is not right.
Q52 Mr Sanders: Do these tickets
not have "not for resale" on them?
Mr Blackburn: Yes.
Q53 Mr Sanders: Why do you not take
them off?
Mr Blackburn: Because they do
not put up the seat numbers. We cannot trace them back. We have
asked eBay to do this. We have asked them all to do this so we
can see where the seat numbers are. When we have been able to
do it, we have done it. We did it for Kylie Minogue. We managed
to trace quite a lot of the seat numbers but, if they are hidden,
as they are here, and there are no details of the seat numbers,
there are about 30 seats of this type, and these are only four
out of that 30 so we cannot identify which seats they are.
Q54 Rosemary McKenna: Tickets coming
from you then people will know are genuine. But what is to stop
a tout going out and selling those?
Mr Blackburn: That is what we
are asking to be stopped. We do put on "These tickets are
not for resale". The problem is, whatever we do, both us
and Ticketmaster have loads of checks to try and stop touts. We
look at multiple bookings, same street addresses, multiple use
of credit cards, all the things you can do with a ticketing system
to find out whether touts are attacking it to buy tickets. This
question of refunds is a red herring, because the bulk of the
tickets that are put on eBay are put on six months in advance
of the event happening. Nobody knows six months before whether
they can attend an event or not. We sell tickets for the Killers;
within two minutes the tickets are up on eBay. These are not people
who cannot go to the event. These are people taking tickets away
from genuine fans paying the face value. We estimate that 25-30%
of tickets are taken out in this way, and it is wrong. As the
previous panel said, ticket prices are set at a fair rate for
the audience of that act. 30% go out, 30% of the fans who want
to see it cannot buy those tickets at the right price because
people are using the opportunities given to them by eBay and viagogo
to make a quick profit.
Mr Williamson: We are seeing this
all the time. We put on sale last week the Heineken European cup
final of rugby for 2008 at the Millennium Stadium. Within 24 hours
those tickets were appearing on eBay. There are thousands of tickets
still available from the stadium. We are representing the stadium
but people are trying to make a fast buck now with no intention
of ever going to the event. Likewise with Prince at the new O2.
Prince has put on 21 nights of shows with all the tickets at £31
deliberately to try and maximise the audience, the Prince fans
out there, and those seats are appearing online for £120
a ticket, £140 a ticket.
Q55 Chairman: Are all 21 nights sold
out?
Mr Williamson: Not yet, no.
Q56 Chairman: Who is going to pay
£120 for a ticket online if they can go to the O2 and get
one for £31?
Mr Williamson: We hope they will
do so.
Mr Blackburn: I was at a Rod Stewart
concert at Earls Court. I was watching the fans come in and people
were complaining about buying tickets at excessive prices, when
the show was not even sold out. One customer said, "I paid
£400 for my two tickets." I said, "Why did you
do that? You could have bought the tickets at face value through
us." He said, "Because I saw an ad in the Daily Mail.
I thought the Daily Mail was a respectable paper. This
is what I thought the fair price was." That is why they bought
the tickets. Not all of the public are as bright as maybe they
should be in buying tickets.
Q57 Rosemary McKenna: I am convinced
by the argument that we need to do something to protect young
people, particularly those who want to go to concerts, but what
you really need to do is persuade us what the best way is to actually
do that. What legislation would you want the Government to bring
in?
Mr Williamson: I think we are
in agreement with previous speakers. We would like to see the
legislation which is there for football and for the Olympics being
extended. I think it has worked very well in football. I think
it has removed a lot of ticket touting and a lot of the issues
around football because it is seen as illegal to resell those
tickets and it has certainly been made much more difficult. We
would like to see that extended into other events, into other
sports and music events, because we think that is fair and safer
in the end for the customer.
Mr Wright: We would also like
to see greater self-regulation. STAR is the self-regulation body
for much of the industry. We have nearly 100 members. You heard
from Rob Ballantine the commitment of his members as well to tie
up with STAR. We have spent the last few years developing standard
terms and conditions that would give reassurance to all potential
purchasers here and overseas that they are going to get a good
deal, all those services that have been touched on this morning.
We want to extend that self-regulation. We have been in discussion
with the OFT to get those terms and conditions approved. We think
it is a key step that if the industry all move to the same terms
and conditions, we can then have a kitemark to say to people "Beware.
This is the primary market where you know that they have the tickets,
you know where you are going to be sitting, you know if the event
is cancelled not only do you get a refund but you get a refund
of the booking fee if they are a STAR member as well, but if you
go out of that accredited environment, then buyer beware."
That is something we can do quite quickly by having the terms
and conditions recognised and accepted and supported by the Government
and industry.
Q58 Chairman: How is the OFT reacting?
Mr Brown: On the whole, we have
come to an agreement. The terms are drafted but at the heart of
the issue is the ability to enforce the transferability clause,
which is going back to the question you had about whether we can
prevent the resale of tickets in the terms and conditions. It
is certainly true in terms of business to business or business
to customer transactions, but not between customers. I think it
is worth just getting rid of a misunderstanding there, if there
is one. I do not think, certainly in terms of entertainment tickets,
there is any concern about customers being able to pass tickets
on to their friends, to sell them and mitigate their losses, as
it were, by selling the tickets for the price they paid for them.
The issue comes when they start selling them commercially, selling
them for a profit, whether that is friend to friend or through
mechanisms such as online auctions.
Mr Blackburn: I think the difficulty
as well is the Crown Jewels issue. There are events like Glastonbury
Festival, which we handled this year with pictures on the tickets.
We have had a lot of the public saying to us "What a great
way of doing tickets." Fortunately, we had a lot of time
to set that up and do it. A lot of events come round more quickly.
I did an interview with Sky where they asked me why could Liverpool
not have done that for the European cup final but you do not have
the time to do it. I think the public really appreciated that.
Two years ago when we did Glastonbury they asked me "Why
did these tickets appear on eBay?" and so on. Nothing this
year. It was appreciated by the public. Events change. Rod Stewart
might have been hot—we keep bringing him up—five years
ago, and not so hot this year. To call them Crown Jewels, to differentiate
between various music acts is difficult. You have got to have
a catch-all law about the resale of tickets generally for any
event. The Sound of Music was hot; for the first six months it
was one of the hottest tickets you could get.
Q59 Paul Farrelly: One of the ways
that an industry is regulated or self-regulated, if you take the
travel industry, ABTA, every operator is bonded so the consumer
knows where they are. If a firm fails, they get their money back.
It is not just dodgy secondary sellers that go bust like ticket
touts. Keith Prowse went belly-up years ago, as I remember. Is
that an approach that the industry might consider?
Mr Edmonds: We have tried ticket
insurance-type initiatives, whereby when the consumer has bought
their ticket, they will be able to pay a couple more pounds per
ticket to cover themselves for any eventuality—travel problems,
family problems—but we found the uptake of that was not
very significant. I am interested to see that Seatwave, who you
are talking to later, are doing a similar type of scheme. We have
found there has not been a huge level of uptake on that. We think
they are actually trying to get the balance right in terms of
ticket exchange mechanisms, like we are doing with Geoff Ellis
for T in the Park. It is a very strong approach and it protects
the consumer. To go back to the earlier point, you cannot under-estimate
how much the consumer needs protecting here. You had the recent
example of tickettout.com, which went into receivership; over
7,000 customers lost their money there. You have to question how
confused the consumer is if they are actually going to a website
called "tickettout.com" and purchasing their tickets
through them.
Mr Williamson: We end up picking
up the pieces. These customers turn up at the George Michael concert
at Wembley or the Heineken cup final at Twickenham saying, "Here
is my booking sheet, here is my reference number. Can I have my
tickets please?" and our staff have to explain to them that
it is complete fiction. "Someone has run off with your money.
That is the end of it. You have been defrauded."
Mr Wright: We are all talking
about individual examples. Let us not forget that Westminster
Trading, for example, received hundreds of complaints over the
last few years, many from overseas visitors who had arranged their
flights and their travel, had booked their Genesis tickets or
their Guys and Dolls tickets, they come to this country and those
tickets do not exist, or they are standing tickets at the back
which they have paid £250 for. Is this the reputation we
want to present to our overseas visitors?
Mr Blackburn: The other thing
is Mr Davies asked who lost out? The Government lose out as well
because do you think these people pay VAT and tax? I very much
doubt it.
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