$2669 for a ticket to see Sir Elton? Don’t go breaking my heart
WITH thousands of tickets to Sir Elton John’s Bathurst show yet to go on sale, vendors on online reselling platform Viagogo are already trying their luck at making a handsome profit.
Pre-sale tickets to Sir Elton’s show went on sale on Friday morning to eligible Telstra customers and sold out within minutes.
But those tickets were just some of the 15,000 or so tickets set to be made available for the January 22, 2020 show at Carrington Park, with sales to the general public to go live at 9am this coming Friday, February 15.
But that has not stopped dozens of modern day scalpers from trying to off-load tickets to the Bathurst show at massively inflated prices on Viagogo.
When the Western Advocate checked the website at about lunchtime on Monday, it said there were less than four per cent of tickets left for this event. [Not true, many the tickets for the event have not yet gone on sale.]
Interested to see what tickets were available, the Advocate indicated we wanted to buy two tickets, seated together, and a long list of options came up.
While tickets to Sir Elton’s show through the authorised agent started at $139, the cheapest available on Viagogo was $418.
Worse, they ranged up to an extraordinary $2669 per ticket in [the post claimed] section A2.
$2669 for a ticket to see Sir Elton? Don’t go breaking my heart
INFLATED: Tickets to Sir Elton John's Bathurst show were being offered for sale for up to $2669 on Viagogo on Monday.
INFLATED: Tickets to Sir Elton John's Bathurst show were being offered for sale for up to $2669 on Viagogo on Monday.
The Western Advocate reported recently that tickets to a number of shows at the Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre had been sold through Viagogo only for the purchaser to find they were invalid when they tried to enter the venue.
Viagogo maintains there is nothing illegal about its reselling market and says people shouldn’t be denied entry to shows after purchasing tickets through the marketplace.
“All tickets on Viagogo are valid and it is perfectly legal to re-sell a ticket or give it to someone else if you want to,” the company said in a statement to the Western Advocate.
“Viagogo is a marketplace and doesn’t buy or sell tickets. Viagogo provides a platform for third party sellers to sell tickets to event goers. Viagogo does not set ticket prices, sellers set their own prices, which may be above or below the original face value.
“Event organisers sometimes make claims that they will deny entry to people who have purchased resold tickets. These types of entry restrictions are highly unfair and, in our view, unenforceable and illegal.”