Ticketmaster may have breached law in pricing Oasis tickets, says UK watchdog
Ireland's competition and consumer protection watchdog, the CCPC, has opened its own investigation into Ticketmaster's handling of the sale of Oasis tickets for their concerts here. That investigation is currently ongoing.
The UK competition watchdog has said Ticketmaster may have broken consumer protection law in the way it sold more than 900,000 tickets for Oasis’s reunion tour last year.
An investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has found Ticketmaster may have misled fans, some of whom paid more than £350 (€419) for tickets with a face value of £150, in the way it priced tickets for the band’s comeback gigs this year.
The CMA said the ticketing giant may have “breached” consumer protection law by labelling certain seats as “platinum”, and selling them for almost 2.5 times the price of standard equivalent tickets, without sufficiently explaining they did not offer any additional benefits and were often located in the same area of a stadium as standard tickets.
Ireland's competition and consumer protection watchdog, the CCPC, has opened its own investigation into Ticketmaster's handling of the sale of Oasis tickets for their concerts here. That investigation is currently ongoing.
The UK regulator has said fans were not informed there were two categories of standing tickets at different prices, with many waiting lengthy periods in online queues without understanding they would be paying much higher prices than they expected.
Hayley Fletcher, interim senior director of consumer protection at the CMA, said: “Fans reported problems when buying Oasis tickets from Ticketmaster and we decided those concerns warranted investigation.
Consumer group Which? has previously said Oasis and Ticketmaster should refund fans who paid hundreds of pounds more than the face value of tickets after “dynamic pricing” was used to inflate prices.
However, the CMA said on Tuesday that, while many fans were under the impression Ticketmaster used an algorithmic pricing model during the Oasis sale, which adjusts prices in real time in line with demand, it had not found evidence this was the case.
Instead, Ticketmaster sold a number of standing tickets at a lower price and, when those sold out, it released more at a much higher price.
“Although prices were not adjusted in real time using an algorithm, the CMA is concerned that consumers were not given clear and timely information about how the pricing of standing tickets would work, particularly where many customers had to wait in lengthy queues to see what tickets were available,” the CMA said.
The CMA said since it opened its investigation, Ticketmaster had made changes to “some aspects” of its ticket sales process, but the regulator “does not currently consider these changes are sufficient to address its concerns”.
The regulator is now in consultation with the ticketing giant.
Ticketmaster has been approached for comment.
