Tickets.com In the News: Pick Best Site to Buy Tickets Online

By GREG HAYMES, Staff writer
TimesUnion.com
First published in print: Thursday, January 29, 2009

ALBANY — What's the difference between Ticketmaster, TicketsNow and Tickets.com? Only one of them sells tickets at face value for events at Times Union Center.

Christine Krauss of Greenville went online Saturday morning to buy a pair of tickets for the April 17 rock concert by the Dead at Times Union Center as a birthday present for her daughter. Not a regular ticket buyer, she assumed that tickets would be sold by Ticketmaster and, sure enough, the Ticketmaster Web site listed the show.

She clicked on it and was redirected to another site, TicketsNow.com, where tickets were $134 each. She bought them, and with the add-on charges — service and handling fees, as well as shipping charges — the cost was $325.

What she didn't realize until a couple of days later is that online tickets for events at Times Union Center are sold on Tickets.com, not Ticketmaster. And the actual sale prices for the Dead tickets are $56 and $96.

Her confusion was fueled, in part, by the market for secondary ticket sales that blossomed after New York state rolled back restrictions on ticket resales in June 2007. The practice is commonly referred to as "ticket scalping," which Krauss assumed was still illegal.

TicketsNow — a Ticketmaster company — is a secondary ticket seller, which means there are no limits on the asking price of tickets. And that's perfectly legal.

A small sentence posted on the TicketsNow site just above the list of prices states: "Note: Tickets may be sold for more than the price listed on the ticket."

And before Ticketmaster redirects buyers to the TicketsNow site, another note briefly pops up that says, "For this event, we are not selling tickets directly to the public on behalf of the event provider. We are redirecting you to our resale partner site, TicketsNow, where you can purchase tickets from resellers safely and conveniently."

On Monday, Krauss logged onto Tickets.com and bought another pair of tickets. She paid $113 less and got better seats. "I don't understand how Ticketmaster can list an event that they don't sell tickets for," she said. "I feel like I got scammed."

Now she's trying to get a refund for the $325 she forked over to TicketsNow. But, she says, a service representative for TicketsNow told her to resell her tickets on the TicketsNow Web site. Her husband then called, but they're still waiting for a resolution to the refund issue.

Meanwhile, the world of rock rolls on. And to avoid confusion in the future — especially with tickets for the May 14 concert by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Times Union Center going on sale Monday — remember that tickets for all Times Union Center events are sold online at http://tickets.com/.