Labor ministers urge more action on ticket reselling after Choice report
Tony Burke, Shadow Minister for the Arts, and Tim Hammond, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs, have responded to a report by consumer advocacy group Choice which provided some damning statistics on ticket resellers in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom,
Choice’s Sold Out: Consumers & The Ticket Resale Industry, released August 30, called for urgent reform of an industry that it said was rife with “trickery and confusion.”
It found that 11% of complaints said their credit card had been over-charged, 8% received fake tickets and 11% said they never saw their tickets.
In a joint statement the Ministers said, “From May 10 of this year Labor has been calling on the Government to urgently look into the fake ticket reseller Viagogo and take action by talking to the major search engines to prevent consumers being exposed to the dishonest practice of being sold fake or overpriced tickets.
“The Choice report found 79% of Australian case studies in their study were tricked into believing the site they were using for purchasing tickets was the official seller and not that of a third-party resale site.
“More than three quarters of Choice study participants across Australia, New Zealand and the UK who found their ticket through a google search believed they were purchasing through the sellers official website and not a resale site.”
Data from Choice’s report earlier this year was handed over to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in March which on Monday initiated court action against Viagogo for alleged breaches of consumer law.
Yesterday’s report examined over a thousand complaints in the three territories.
It found that tickets bought in Australia from resale sites as Viagogo, TicketMaster Resale and StubHub were sold higher than face value in 83% of cases, had hidden fees tacked on in 68% of cases and were for the wrong seats in 8% of cases.
Four out of five Australians believed they were buying tickets from an official vendor because of the way they were designed and marketed.
They also use “deceptive tactics known as dark patterns” to panic consumers into buying tickets by making them think the tickets were almost sold out.
The new Choice study is at their website.
Earlier this week prominent promoter Michael Chugg spoke to TMN about how he considers Viagogo’s activity to be “gouging” punters and the music industry alike. See what he had to say in full here.