Fans were disappointed when posting to social media when they were unable to get a hold of Colter Wall tickets. Eli J. Ridder/CHAT News

By Jayk Sterkenburg

ENTERTAINMENT

Medicine Hat aims to fight ticket resellers by tracking ‘suspicious transactions’

Nov 19, 2024 | 5:46 PM

A Medicine Hat official says the city-owned box office aims to pro-actively prevent ticket speculating by flagging “suspicious transactions”, an approach made possible by its small size.

Speculators buy event tickets in bulk with the intention to resell at a higher price.

Tickets will be sold out before most will even have a chance to look, and reappear on the market for — in some cases — thousands of dollars.

Ticket portal Tixx is seeing the effect more lately than ever, especially with the recent Colter Wall show at the Esplanade going on sale this past week.

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Tickets sold out within six minutes, leaving many interested in attending feeling defeated.

On social media, Darcey Swennumson praised the Esplanade for selling tickets for $84.50 but blasted the speculators reselling for as high as $619.

“Maybe the goal was an intimate concert, but I doubt anyone feels ‘intimate’ when they’re fighting bots,” another social media user wrote.

Trampas Brown, the city’s guest experience and operations manager, says that managing smaller venues as compared to those in bigger cities has prevented them from experiencing ticket resales in the past.

Now that it has begun to affect local venues, Brown said that they’re able to manually examine who the tickets are being sold to, and where.

“We’ve got a bit of an advantage because we’re a smaller operation, so we’ve actually proactively looked through our ticket purchasing list and identified some suspicious transactions, geographically or based on some other criteria,” he told CHAT News on Tuesday..

“We’ve actually contacted those patrons to ensure that they’re not trying to resell them on a resale site. We don’t allow refunds or exchanges,” he added.

“We do allow people to resell their tickets, but for no more than the face value.”

Brown said that the team at Guest Experience has managed to reach out to individuals who have purchased tickets.

They are able to determine whether these buyers have intentions of attending the concert they paid for, rather than reselling the ticket.

He said, however, that it’s quite a labour intensive endeavor, yet the most they can do with no legislation set in place to prevent this from happening.

In some instances, tickets are re-sold for thousands of dollars, with $20,000 being the price for some to attend Taylor Swift’s current concerts in Toronto.

“It’s definitely a real issue across the board, you know. If Taylor Swift can’t solve it, I’m probably not going to make much of a dent in it,” he said.

“[We] really encourage them to buy their tickets directly from the venue or the ticketing site,” he added.

“If you’re not sure, go to the venue website, go to the artist or the team website. You know, we’re seeing it with Tiger’s tickets where people are reselling them for an inflated cost because when you google Medicine Hat tickets, there’s some sponsored results that pop up before our ticketing site does.”

As much of a convenience ticket sales have become, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are making their way into the right hands, he explained.