Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-124)
MR JOE
COHEN, MR
GRAHAM BURNS,
MR DOMINIC
TITCHENER-BARRETT,
MR ERIC
BAKER, MR
PAUL DRAKE
AND MR
ALASTAIR MCGOWAN
26 JUNE 2007
Q120 Mr Sanders: Why do you not—this
is to each of you in turn—require sellers to place the ticket
serial number when they are advertising? What are you afraid of
if you are so legit?
Mr Baker: If you are selling used
books you do not have to put the ID of the actual book, the SKU
number or whatnot. We are simply a marketplace. What we know for
sure is that if someone buys a ticket from our marketplace they
are going to get the ticket, it is going to be a good ticket guaranteed—
Q121 Mr Sanders: You do not buy a
book to go into a concert, do you, you buy a ticket, we are talking
about tickets not books, and tickets have serial numbers that
could be very useful for public safety at a football match for
ensuring that fans are segregated, serial numbers could be very
important for ensuring there are not fraudulent tickets out there
that go beyond capacity and therefore endanger people's lives;
why do you not put the serial number up?
Mr Baker: Obviously I share your
passion for safety and security and for the guarantees and that
is why—
Q122 Mr Sanders: You do not, in my
opinion!
Mr Baker: I understand. We work
with Manchester United, we work with Chelsea, we work with Everton,
we work with a number of football clubs. In fact, I believe we
are the only people in this room who operate legally an exchange
with football tickets. What they have found, at least in the opinion
of those clubs, is that everything has been safe, secure and guaranteed
and it has been a step in the right direction of safety because
the key to the entire network is that it is auditable and trackable
who is selling the ticket and we know who is registered as the
seller. Anyone could enter any other type of information they
want but the key thing here is that we have an auditable, trackable
network, and for example if you wanted to know exactly who was
selling X, Y, Z tickets and you had a legal explanation, which
of course as my good friends from eBay say would trump any privacy
protection, we would be able to provide it, in contrast to the
Wild West out there where with people on a street corner you have
no idea who you are dealing with and there is no way to track
it. Registration is the means to secure and protect rather than
an ID number on a ticket, respectfully.
Q123 Helen Southworth: If you want
to protect your consumers, and I am particularly thinking of the
evidence that has just been given by eBay, what code of conduct
would you wish to see across the industry?
Mr Burns: If I may answer this
question. We are actually working with the Office of Fair Trading
along the same lines as STAR, and my colleague Jonathan Brown
has his set of ethics or terms under which his members operate,
and we are working with the Office of Fair Trading to ratify a
code of ethics or a standard of trading for the members of ASTA.
We believe that a course of self-regulation is the best course
of action.
Q124 Helen Southworth: I accept that
but what would it contain; we have not got a lot of time?
Mr Burns: It contains very similar
sorts of guarantees that both Seatwave and viagogo have, frankly,
adopted from the ASTA code of ethics, so a guarantee that you
will get a 150% refund if the man does not provide the ticket,
you will get a refund if the event is cancelled. We are working
towards, although it has not been widely received, a code of bonding
very much along the same lines as ABTA. We have employed independent
arbitrators to step in if there should be a dispute between a
buyer and a seller. It is a long process and we are well down
the road.
Mr Cohen: Can I add to that that
we have actually met with and written to Jonathan Brown of STAR
on several occasions and suggested that the secondary marketplace
and secondary agents work with STAR and the industry as a whole
to come up with a code of conduct/voluntary regulation that works
for all of us. On two or three separate occasions we have been
rebuffed by STAR and I think it is what lies at the heart of the
industry's complaints that this is really about commercial competition
as opposed to what is best for consumers, and we would like to
engage with the wider industry and make sure that we have a voluntary
code of conduct that protect consumers.
Mr Burns: I have here a note from
the Department of Culture, Media and Sport indicating that the
primary market should work with the secondary markets' representative
ASTA to come up with some sort of code of conduct, and despite
my various emails and telephone calls, I have yet to receive a
response from the primary market?
Mr Baker: Again answering your
question very directly on what I believe you asked, we believe
that the key issue is to protect consumers by having this safe,
secure, guaranteed system registering buyers and sellers and making
sure a buyer knows they are going to get the ticket and they are
going to get it on time for the event. We think if you do that
you protect consumers' rights and you will be in a position where
you know that you will not have complaints from fans and consumers
about any unfair practices or tickets and that is why we are very
proud of what we have done and why we have not had complaints.
Mr McGowan: We would also argue
that there ought to be at the heart of this a requirement for
a consumer redress system to be in place for where things go wrong
in a particular marketplace, and that seems to be eminently sensible.
There are other things which we do in relation to face value which
I think I would like to see replicated across the industry. The
other thing we would want to see is the marketplace kept as open
and as competitive as possible because I think what this debate
is really about is not whether you should have a secondary market,
because we think the case for a secondary market is pretty obvious,
and that you should have the right to be able to resell your ticket,
particularly when you do not get a refund. The issue is what sort
of secondary market do you want. On the one hand, you have event
organisers who would love to have a resale market which is determined
by them, where they get to say who has the right to resell a ticket
and who does not and by doing so they then get a share of the
profits. We think it is much better to have a much more open and
competitive resale opportunity. For example, there was much discussion
earlier on about Ticket Exchange that Ticketmaster operate—there
Ticketmaster still take 10% of the final sale value. Why should
people not have the opportunity to go to eBay where the fees are
considerably less? Surely competition will protect the consumer
far better than trying to close up the market and saying that
only certain people are authorised to resell and others are not.
Chairman: We are going to have to stop
it there. Thank you very much.
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