Intervention offers hope on dodgy ticket pricing practices, says Which?

We needn’t go too far back into the history books to spot a particularly egregious example. Nineties Britpop nostalgia swept the nation last August as Oasis announced their long-awaited reunion tour. Lots of fans eager to see them would have accepted the reality that demand might outstrip supply and that they might miss out. That’s the nature of the beast.

But what they didn’t bargain for was the price of tickets to skyrocket in real time. The cost of tickets was increasing to exorbitant levels while many customers were waiting in the online queue to purchase them, making an already tense wait even more stressful.

One of the most shocking elements of this debacle was that customers weren’t warned that prices could increase while they waited to buy their tickets.

Which? received dozens of screenshots from fans: none of them raised the prospect of prices increasing. In fact, we saw one example where fans were shown one ticket price, only for it to be taken away at the last second and replaced with a far higher and unexpected price when the page reloaded.

We shared our findings with the Competition and Markets Authority, the regulator in charge of ensuring markets work fairly, and raised concerns that consumer law had potentially been breached.

I am reviving this sorry saga for good reason. On Tuesday, the CMA announced that Ticketmaster, a website that sold more than 900,00 tickets in the sale, ‘may have misled Oasis fans’ with unclear pricing practices.

The CMA said Ticketmaster may have breached consumer protection laws in two key ways. First, by claiming some seated tickets were ‘platinum’ and so sold them for ‘nearly 2.5 times the price of equivalent standard tickets’, without explaining sufficiently that they ‘did not offer additional benefits’, giving the impression that these tickets were superior.

Second, by not informing consumers of two different categories of standing tickets at different prices, the cheapest of which were all ‘sold before the more expensive standing tickets were released’. This meant lots of customers were left to wait in a lengthy queue ‘without understanding what they would be paying and then having to decide whether to pay a higher price than expected.’

To be clear, this intervention is welcome. The CMA has agreed with Which? that Ticketmaster’s actions during the Oasis ticket sale may have breached consumer protections. The regulator has also pledged to work with Ticketmaster in the future to ensure that this situation won’t be repeated again.

But this will be of little comfort to Oasis fans who will, quite rightly, look back in anger. Many will have felt they had no choice but to stump up lots more cash than they initially expected for a ticket that would have been half the price just hours earlier. That’s why we believe the CMA should go further by insisting that Ticketmaster refund customers whose fandom was exploited to the tune of hundreds of pounds. This should be a cautionary tale. The government, for its part, should look at the ticketing market more widely - and not let the opportunity to reform it in favour of customers slide away.

Ticketmaster UK said in a statement: “At Ticketmaster, we strive to provide the best ticketing platform through a simple, transparent and consumer-friendly experience. We welcome the CMA’s input in helping make the industry even better for fans.”