If you've bought tickets to a concert or sporting event recently, you know how much prices have gone up over the past few years. Tickets to famous performers and hugely popular teams can cost thousands of dollars.
If you've bought tickets to a concert or sporting event recently, you know how much prices have gone up over the past few years. For well-known performers or highly popular teams, costs can run into the thousands of dollars.
Now, in Maryland, there is a movement to make the ticket purchasing process more transparent. The state Legislature in Annapolis is introducing a bill that would clarify how tickets on resale sites like SeatGeek and StubHub are actually sold and what the companies' sellers must disclose about them. was approved.
State Sen. Dawn Gile sponsored the bill. She joined WTOP's Sean Anderson and Anne Kramer on Wednesday to discuss it.
Listen to the interview now or read the transcript below. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
State Sen. Dawn Gile speaks with WTOP's Sean Anderson and Ann Kramer about transparency in ticket resale.
Anne Kramer: Senator, thank you for joining us. Could you please give us a 10 cent tour of what this bill is going to do and how this bill will work to help those of us who can hopefully go to concerts and sporting events this summer? Huh?
Dawn Gile: This bill essentially accomplishes four major things. So the first thing to do is to make ticket prices more transparent. Therefore, this requires each step of the transaction. Often when you try to buy a ticket, the first page will show you the amount, and by the time you get to the last page you are almost ready. To buy tickets. And suddenly all these fees are added on.
Also, you may not know exactly where your seat will be. Therefore, the information initially provided regarding these tickets lacks clarity. To do this, we need to be transparent from the beginning. Speculative tickets will also be banned.
Now, what I learned in the process of crafting this bill is that these are tickets that people don't actually own, and they go and sell those tickets, creating a false sense of urgency.
These secondary sites can occur even before tickets are sold on the primary market. We worked closely with Merriweather Post Pavilion, one of the larger concert venues here in Maryland, and they said this is a very frustrating issue because it leads to higher ticket prices. Ta.
Another part of the bill would impose certain requirements on refunds. That means if the show is cancelled, you have to get your money back. And finally, I hope the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division will conduct an investigation into the ticketing market here in Maryland and make some recommendations about what we can do in the future to eliminate a lot of the deception that is happening here. You will be asked for it. ticket industry.
Sean Anderson: Senator, assuming the governor signs this into law, what can we do as consumers? What if we buy tickets from other sites that are not the actual venue? Should I be careful about this?
Dawn Gile: If you're buying tickets outside of the actual venue, make sure you're buying from a trusted source.
Another thing I learned is invalid URLs. Well, this happened here in Annapolis. The local Annapolis Ballet was putting on a Nutcracker performance around the holidays, but they had heard a lot of complaints from some consumers looking for tickets online to buy The Nutcracker. I did.
Grandma wanted to take her grandchildren to see this performance of The Nutcracker, and tickets were on sale for $250, but they could only be purchased directly from the venue for $20 or $30, and there were two. It was much cheaper than what the next ticket market was going to sell for. And many of them used so-called fraudulent URLs.
These are websites that make it seem like they're sourcing from a major market, but they're actually not. So be careful when people buy tickets online and do a little comparison shopping. However, when browsing, make sure that these sources are truly reliable.
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