Touts, and ordinary consumers, will no longer be able to charge anything more than price at which they bought ticket
Reselling tickets for profit is to be outlawed under plans due to be announced this week, the Guardian has learned, as the government goes ahead with a long-awaited crackdown on touts and resale platforms such as Viagogo and StubHub.
Ministers had been considering allowing touts – and ordinary consumers – to sell on a ticket for up to 30% above the original face value, as part of a consultation process that ended earlier this year.
However, the Guardian understands that reselling a ticket at anything more than the price at which it was originally bought will be banned.
But we are not selling at a profit! The ticket is the same price!
It’s an expensive business though, so we have to charge a processing fee. Of course, to make sure the ticket is legit, we also need to charge a ticket verification fee to ensure that. Card companies are bandits nowadays too, so we are forced to add a card processing fee to cover that, as well as a reservation fee to cover the cost of holding your ticket while you go through the purchase process.
We also add mandatory cancellation insurance (through our sister company) to ensure we don’t have to refund you if the gig is cancelled, only 10% of cost, a bargain!
What do you mean that’s excessive!?! We have to cover costs, the staff costs for our 3 support agents and our hard working CEO alone is crippling, this barely makes us break even!