Price of resale tickets to be capped under plans to clamp down on touts
Share:
The price of resale tickets is to be capped under plans to clamp down on touts, the Government has announced. A consultation will consider the cap among a range of options to make ticket-buying fairer for fans after concert sales for artists including Taylor Swift and Oasis were marred by professional touts reselling at heavily inflated prices.
Others have been caught out by a lack of transparency over the system of dynamic pricing, which left Oasis fans watching the price of some standard tickets more than double from £148 to £355 as they waited in the queue. Typical mark-ups on tickets sold on the secondary market are more than 50%, according to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), while investigations by Trading Standards have uncovered evidence of tickets being resold for up to six times their original cost.
Research by Virgin Media O2 suggests that ticket touts cost music fans an extra £145 million a year. The CMA has estimated the value of tickets sold in 2019 through secondary ticketing platforms to be about £350 million, with around 1.9 million tickets sold on these platforms – around 5% to 6% of the number of primary tickets.
The public consultation will consider views on capping resale prices on a range from the original price to up to a 30% uplift, as well as limiting the number of tickets resellers can list to the maximum they are allowed to purchase on the primary market.
