Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by justinlkarr 953 days ago
From your friends in event ticketing: welcome to the struggle, and we're sorry.

I hope Resy figures this out, and I hope we're able to learn from (or license) their solution.

I expect their approach will look similar to our path: fight the secondary market with every legal tool, work with them when you can't, improve pricing algorithms to reduce arbitrage opportunity.

Customers on both sides of their market will probably be frustrated with each effort. They want to cook and eat, not "be in a marketplace". They will probably blame Resy.

The secondary market will probably engage legislative resources, attempting to tailor the law to protect their practices. They will probably do this "in the interest of diners". It will probably become illegal to restrict transfer of reservations, among other things.

Good luck y'all. Reach out if you need support. Love, Broadway

1 comments

The ticketing industry could completely stop reselling if they wanted to. Require the person who purchases the tickets to be the person who uses the ticket. No transferring, no reselling. But companies would lose out on all that sweet scalper cash, plus they would have to have a virtually unlimited refund policy to deal with legitimately unneeded tickets. I always figured that one-two punch of revenue loss is what prevents ticketing companies from saving us from this hell they've created.
Banning resales is illegal in some places!

But then again, e.g. in New York, it's apparently also illegal to resell a ticket for more than 10% above its face value, yet ticket scalping does not seem to be a solved problem...

True on 1 but not on 2.

There is no longer a limit on the amount you can resell a ticket for in NYS.

see NYS ACA 11-C, Title G, 25.30(c): https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/ACA/25.30

The first-sale doctrine says the ticket industry could not, in fact, stop reselling.

That said, your plan is one ticket per identified person, that you can't buy 4 tickets at a time for you and your friends? Not sure that'll fly, even with people who hate Ticketmaster.

You just need to be at the ticket gate with anyone you purchased a ticket for. Not ideal, but better than our current dysfunction.