Tackling ticket touts

George Akins, DHP Group

14 APRIL 2007

OPERATORS TACKLE TICKET TOUTS

UPFRONT, NEWS, MAY 2007, COMMENTS

As the Glastonbury Music Festival once again tightens up its ticketing procedures in the fight against ticket touts, club and live music venue operators across the country are also assessing their ticketing provision.

DHP, the premier live music and club operator in the Midlands, which owns and operates venues with a cumulative nightly capacity of 4,000 and promotes and hosts more than 500 shows annually, has implemented new systems that allow staff to trace the buyers of tickets that end up on internet sites and unauthorised ticket agents and stop them making future bookings. Where possible, the tickets will not even be sent out, preventing them from being sold on.

MD of DHP, George Akins (pictured), says combating the ticket touts is not an easy battle, but is one they will continue to fight. “The growth of sites such as Ebay has transformed touting from a single man on the corner into big business. Touting is now a serious problem, covering not only the sale of tickets at vastly inflated prices but also instances where people pay for tickets and never receive them.”
“It’s also about the security measures in place on individual tickets,” added George. “More than 200 counterfeit tickets ended up on the market before The Killers’ gig in 2006. Because of the way our tickets are produced, we managed to spot all of them and now make sure that our ticket stock is changed regularly, as an additional deterrent.”

Also announcing developments to its ticketing services provision is Academy Music Group (AMG), which currently operates eleven venues across the UK including West London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Carling Academy venues in Brixton, Birmingham, Liverpool, Islington, Newcastle, Glasgow and The Zodiac in Oxford as well as two Bar Academy sites in the Capital and Birmingham. In February 2007, AMG announced the acquisition of its twelfth venue, The Hippodrome in Brighton, with plans to redevelop this site in due course.

AMG has announced the renewal of its contract with TicketWeb, the UK’s leading self-service fully functioned box office service, to provide ticketing services provider for the Group.

As part of the new agreement TicketWeb will continue to provide full box office and trade desk services for AMG venues. TicketWeb’s access control system eEntry will continue to be operated across the venues, with the exception of some of the higher capacity venues, who will switch over to AccessManager, an access control system especially designed to streamline the ticketing process for larger venues.

eEntry and AccessManager scan bar-coded event tickets with hand held scanners, monitor entry traffic and authenticate event admissions. The system deters counterfeit tickets through its ability to scan the unique barcode on the ticket and deny access where appropriate. It also denies access to tickets that have been invalidated by being resold via the un-authorised secondary market against the terms and conditions of sale.

AMG customers will also continue to benefit from an innovative addition to TicketWeb, TicketFast, which allows customers to download and print their tickets at home. Each ticket contains the customer’s name and booking reference number. The unique barcode printed on the ticket is scanned at the venue utilising TicketWeb’s eEntry or AccessManager technology.

Steve Forster, AMG Operations Director said, “We want to provide our customers with the easiest and most efficient way to purchase tickets and continue to offer them the choice of booking methods they demand.”

From: MAY 2007 Issue

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