Investigation discovers that most tickets on Viagogo are sold by just three sellers
A new investigation into the ticket marketplace website Viagogo has found that just three individual traders sell most tickets on the site.
FanFair Alliance had been working with ITV News for over three months to discover that only three sellers had listed the majority of tickets to festivals and concerts on Viagogo. This means that regular public members had listed less than 10 per cent of tickets on the website.
The investigation examined 174 festivals and outdoor concerts during the allotted period, which amounted to 11,000 tickets. Three individual traders were selling over two-thirds of that amount. The combined face value of the three traders’ up-for-sale tickets was around £730,000, but the reality of the cost was far higher at an approximate £1.7 million.
One facet of ticket selling that the investigation explored was speculative selling, where traders would sell tickets to customers that they hadn’t even bought themselves yet, buying them instead after the sale. Speculative selling is illegal but is rife in the online ticket re-selling market.
Ed Townsend, who runs the Cardiff Psych and Noise Festival in Wales, claimed that he found 20 tickets on Viagogo, which was a shock. He said, “It doesn’t make any sense to me because when you look at the backend of our ticket sales, we’ve only sold 14 tickets to the event. Total. That doesn’t make any sense to me. We haven’t announced a lineup; we’re not expected to sell many tickets already, but to sell 20 tickets, I would’ve seen 20 tickets sold to two individuals, ten tickets each, but that hasn’t happened at all.”
A spokesperson for Viagogo said of the inquiry, “We treat concerns about tickets with the utmost priority. In this instance, we acted swiftly to remove the relevant listings and have returned several to the site that have clearly demonstrated that they are legitimate and valid. We continue to review the remaining listings, and these remain off site.”
However, by law, Viagogo is still not required to check the finer details of every ticket, so it is unsurprising to find mass re-selling and speculative selling still an issue.
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