[zeroonetwothree]

It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.

There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

I can't do this with airline tickets, hotel bookings, train tickets, dinner reservations, or any other kind of receipt that allows me to put my butt in a seat at a specified time.

Why are concert tickets special?

[Kirby64]

Airline tickets and train tickets are because they want to identify the person, for tracking/supposed national security purposes. Also, you typically can transfer train tickets. Depends on the country.

Dinner reservations: I’ve literally never had an issue “transferring” a reservation. There’s no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, I’ve never once had anyone question that.

Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons, so transferring them should not be a problem.

[dghlsakjg]

Airline tickets are done for identity at some level (although even that is dubious since until recently you could fly without any id at all), but at another level they charge exorbitant fees to change the name on the ticket or even to just cancel the itinerary.

[mr_toad]

Seems to be partly price discrimination, I guess that people willing to pay more will fork out for flexible tickets. Same goes for seat allocation.

[bdangubic]

there are 300 people on the plane (big one) and 80k people watching taylor swift. national security is funny way to put this…

[kube-system]

To be fair, we didn't start having the government screen people on planes when hijackers were merely endangering one plane worth of people. About 3,000 people died and likely tens of thousands of people were injured before we started doing that.

[bdangubic]

Because 3,000 people died I am unable to just transfer my upcoming flight to someone else? Even if this crazy sentence rang through in any way, just this year I had to fly twice "the next day" so-to-speak and basically bought tickets and then flew the next day. 9/11 is as far from a reason why airline tickets are non-transferable as it gets.

[kube-system]

I didn’t make the claim you’re arguing against, that was someone else.

But the answer to your question is: partially

The reason you can’t change it overall is simply airline policy for business reasons. But the reason you can’t change even a misspelling within the last couple of days before a flight is in fact security related.

[coderjames]

> Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons

Admittedly I haven't been to many concerts, but 'national security reasons' seems like a reasonable rationale to me because a packed concert sounds like a great place to set off a suicide bomb vest for maximum impact. Have a cut-out who doesn't raise any red flags buy the ticket and hand it off to the person wearing the vest. No ID check? Mass panic ensues when the vest goes off, and people are hurt in the stampede for the exits even if the blast radius of the vest itself isn't all that large.

[mixmastamyk]

Lots of big venues have metal detectors or wands, which targets the right thing, instead of privacy.

[IAmBroom]

By your argument, you should have to produce ID before going into any crowded public space.

Pure security theater, and your argument is further invalidated by the fact that it's a made-up reason. No one has claimed this is mandated by TSA or other security authorities.

[alistairSH]

Metal detectors or whatever other measures are a more direct solution

[saaaaaam]

You can change a name on a flight. There’s a fee perhaps. I don’t know where you are but in most European countries train tickets are valid to the bearer. Dinner reservations, I’ve never once been asked for ID. And indeed I’ve often had reservations made by others for me, or arranged reservations for friends and colleagues from out of town - “I know a great restaurant you’ll like, I’ll reserve a table, just give them my name”.

Hotel bookings - again, the number of times I’ve booked a bunch of rooms for work under my name and then we just assign them at check-in, and the number of times I’ve travelled for work where the hotel room is reserved in someone else’s name.

So yeah, pretty sure this is commonplace that the person who shows up with the chit and can verify certain info gets the access.

And of course, there nothing at all to stop concert tickets being sold to verified buyers and then transferred to other verified buyers.

But during this court hearing it transpired - from emails sent by Michael Rapino - that Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s “Verified Fan” scheme is just a scam to make artist feel like ticketing isn’t the murky Wild West that Ticketmaster knows it is. “Verified Fan” meant almost nothing.

[guiambros]

I like the combined suggestions of three other commenters:

1) Allow transfers during a very short window (e.g. 24h before the event)

2) Allow full refunds up to x days before the event

3) Release a small batch of tickets 24h before the event, as a way of reducing the chance for scalpers to make money, and giving real fans a last chance without paying exorbitant prices

All three together offer a reasonable tradeoff. The tickets will go (mostly) to real fans, yet still giving you flexibility in case your plans change (work, sick, etc). And if you know well in advance, you can get a full refund, without having to worry with reselling, paying commission, etc.

Also prohibit secondary markets entirely. Similar to airlines, there's no reselling of tickets.

Of course, this is just wishful thinking. Too many intermediaries benefit from screwing showgoers, so this will never be implemented.

[kube-system]

For most popular events there are enough people who want or need to make plans more than 24h in advance that scalping would still be profitable.

[rplnt]

Dinner reservations is a weird one. I have never heard of this concept where they would id you while you are being seated. Maybe there are super exclusive restaurants I'm oblivious to? But even so, roughly 100% of dinner reservations can be implicitly transferred.

[tshaddox]

Pretty sure with air travel it's just a security issue, and all the other ones you can totally do.

[ChildOfChaos]

You can do this with train tickets, dinner reservations and hotel bookings though? Only thing you can’t do that with is for flights and that’s due to security checks/passport etc

Most concert tickets are not standing and you used to get paper tickets you could just hand to someone else, why should you not be allowed to do this just because it moved to digital?

[traderj0e]

I think they do kinda work that way. When you buy an airline ticket through some third-party website, the price is lower than the main site, yet they're making a profit. They must be hoarding then reselling tickets with the airline's permission, right? Same with cruises.

The thing is, you as an individual can't transfer tickets because of what the other person said.

[jorvi]

Airline tickets used to be transferable. Hell, you used to be able to fly on someone else's name.

9/11 changed a lot. Just like how before World War I, passports and border controls weren't really a thing.

[butlike]

Cause you can't traffic someone at a concert. Doesn't make sense if I can buy a plane ticket then transfer the ticket to the girl I'm trafficking.

[paganel]

Because they're not airline tickets nor hotel bookings. Crazy though that nowadays train tickets have started implementing this ID thing (I'll take your word for it, last time I purchased a train ticket, as a tourist, I had to input no name on it, it was either in Italy or Switzerland, I forgot), the same goes for dinner reservations. Enshittification is indeed accelerating.

[autoexec]

> For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?

Or you give your friend's names when buying their tickets so they can go even when you can't or you have them buy their own tickets, or you're sick so you get a refund for your four tickets and your friends each buy their own afterwards.

[rurcliped]

For many events, the demographics lean toward age groups where people have jobs with work schedules that aren't known more than a few weeks in advance. The initially planned friend group (e.g., four people) can have little overlap with who is actually free on the event date and actually attends. Also, if the event has assigned seating, people buying their own tickets typically has the adverse outcome that you can't sit together.

[dghlsakjg]

The rebuttal is: works fine on airplanes (minus abusive change fees for economy seats)

[hgoel]

Most flights are available at high frequencies (on the order of days, weeks) compared to concerts (once a year or so). You also don't care as much about sitting together on a plane.

[ipaddr]

You care just as much on a plane. Sitting beside wife/friend => stranger

[hgoel]

I disagree, if you can't get seats with your friends in a concert, you might just not go because the social aspect is part of the experience, but if you can't get neighboring seats on a plane, you'd (or at least I would) just tolerate it since you would still get to be together at the main event (the destination).

[mrWiz]

This position sounds bonkers to me. I don’t care at all about who I sit next to on a plane but like to see concerts with friends.

[bdangubic]

> It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?

Get a refund if you can't go

> Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.

This is easy part.

> There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping

There of course are but they pale in comparison to what is currently happening with scalping. And as many have pointed out, there are a lot of other "tickets" we buy that are 100% non-transferable, these are because wrong people are making too much money

[alistairSH]

We don’t have to use one broken market (airline seats) as a model for another broken market (concerts).

Anyway back to the top post - a Dutch auction foods almost all these issues without weird rules.

[ipaddr]

A Dutch auction kills first day sales and would affect those who need to plan ahead. It will create less ticket sales for medium tiered acts.

[alistairSH]

Do we (the consumers) care about first day sales?

And maybe we only do dutch auctions for the big acts that have the worst issues with scalping and whatnot.

[carlosjobim]

> Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?

You sell your own ticket back to the event. Your three friends of course have their names on their tickets, so they can go if they want to.

> Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.

Do you buy gifts to people whose name you don't even know?

[cococohen1122]

I tend to buy 2-4 tickets for a show way in advance of me knowing which of my friends would go with me

[carlosjobim]

Sure, that won't be possible with name-tied tickets. On the other hand, you can wait on buying those tickets until you know.