Photo: Sergey Vdovin/Interpress

Organizers of concerts and festivals are looking for ways to combat speculators actively selling tickets in St. Petersburg. According to the organizers, due to the unauthorized resale of tickets (for sporting, concert and theater events), they suffer serious financial and image losses. Business sees several ways to solve this problem, the main one of which is to abandon the sale of paper tickets and switch to 100% electronic circulation with subsequent personification of event visitors.

Big money

According to program director of the Erarta Museum Denis Rubin, overbuying tickets damages the reputation of the site. “Often people don’t understand where the new price suddenly came from, thinking that it’s the price of the site. In addition, resellers leave part of the audience without tickets at a reasonable price, who in the end either simply do not go to the concert or are forced to part with a lot of money,” he explains.

The president of the promotion company NCA, Mikhail Shurygin, confirms that speculators cause the greatest harm to event organizers. “On concert days, scalpers stand and sell their remaining tickets at reduced prices. If it's a full house, then there's no problem, because the box office is empty. But when tickets are available at the box office, for example, for 2 thousand rubles, and people buy them for 1.5 thousand from resellers who bought tickets for 1 thousand rubles, this causes serious damage to the organizer’s business,” he notes. “When only expensive tickets remain on official sale, the illegal resale of tickets of a lower price category can slow down official sales,” confirms Valeria Bagryantseva, general director of the ticket operator MUZBILET.RU.

Director and founder of the International Ballet Festival Dance Open Ekaterina Galanova:

I know that resellers are a huge problem for all participants in the cultural events market. For example, large theaters are often accused of offering overpriced tickets and preventing people from attending performances. But what can their leadership do? When the price drops, tickets immediately begin to be bought by speculators and sold at exorbitant prices.

For example, this year we tried to make a line of tickets that were as differentiated in price as possible. In addition to expensive and medium-priced ones, they offered an economical option, when people buy seats on the first, second or third tier, but, nevertheless, they have the opportunity to buy these tickets. Cheap tickets were on sale for a very short time. Now we find them on Avito at a price that is 7 times more expensive than what we set.

The producer, on the one hand, risks the money he paid for the troupe’s visit and advertising. But on the other hand, he tries to behave nobly, he always remembers that one cannot offend the viewer, who should be able to buy an economical ticket. The existence of a black market for tickets does not allow the event organizer to fully control the pricing policy. For example, we would be ready to reduce the cost of tickets for certain items, but now it makes no sense to do this, because such tickets will immediately be resold.

Scheme

Speaking about ticket resale schemes, M. Shurygin points to box office cashiers who can collude with resellers: “There are entire groups of speculators who buy the cheapest tickets for events.” “As long as paper tickets are sold, as long as there is the possibility of reselling a ticket as some kind of non-personalized commercial product, the human factor will always work,” he says.

The Erarta representative, in turn, reports on virtual methods of speculation. “Resellers can track promotions on tickets and then sell them at full or inflated prices. Another type of fraud is certain information sites that support barter events for entrance tickets, and then sell these tickets,” he clarifies.

Reference

According to Petrostat, in 2015 the volume of paid services to city residents by cultural institutions amounted to 15.5 billion rubles, which is 3.9% more than a year earlier. According to the rating of the highest-grossing entertainment in Russia, compiled by RBC, in the 2014/2015 season, the State Hermitage Museum with the exhibition “At the Court of the Russian Emperors. Costume of the 18th – early 19th centuries in the Hermitage collection”, the Mariinsky Theater is the absolute leader in the rating, presented there 8 times with several ballets at once - “Swan Lake”, “Don Quixote”, “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”, “La Bayadère”, “The Nutcracker”, “Giselle”, “Anna Karenina” and “The Little Humpbacked Horse”, as well as the Quidam circus performance at the Ice Palace.

According to the passport

M. Shurygin believes that the problem of speculation with tickets can be solved by switching to full electronic sales. “The ticket must be sold to a specific person, and this person can gain access to the site upon presentation of an ID. Or a person picks up a ticket immediately before the event, after sale, also upon presentation of an ID.” Today, the number of electronic sales in St. Petersburg, according to M. Shurygin’s estimates, does not exceed 20% (in Moscow this share is much higher). “This is a feature of St. Petersburg; our rate at theater box office is extremely high,” he adds.

E. Galanova agrees with M. Shurygin: “One of the methods of fighting resellers is the targeted sale of tickets with an email address, registration, passport data, etc.” Another way (according to her, possible, but undesirable) is an official increase in ticket prices. “Officially, resellers are no longer interested in expensive tickets,” she says.

Another way to deal with resellers is to introduce penalties when returning a ticket, says E. Galanova. “The fact is that now speculators are not risking anything,” says the founder of Dance Open. “They bought a ticket and have the opportunity to return it to the theater box office at any moment, including at the very last moment. If there were fines, and the organizer had the opportunity to withhold, say, 50% when returning a ticket 24 hours before the start of the event, then the issue would be resolved,” explains E. Galanova.

Virtual path

Experts remind that now the buyer has the right to freely return a ticket to any event with a refund of its full cost. According to intellectual property and commercial law lawyer Viktor Pasternak, in the event of a potential dispute, it is the event organizer who bears the burden of proving the fact of expenses incurred. According to him, it is unlikely that the organizers are ready to disclose information about the economics of the events held in every such case, informing consumers about the costs of holding a particular concert, regardless of their volume.

V. Pasternak reminds that the legislation contains a number of special rules in relation to certain types of services, for example, the Air Code limits the rights of consumers in case of refusal and introduces a penalty for refusal of a service less than 24 hours before departure, but there are no grounds for making an exception to the general rule It is in relation to concert and entertainment events that it is still clearly not enough, he believes.

As well as the organizers, V. Pasternak notes that a gradual transition to an electronic ticket system can be an effective measure to combat resellers who hand over unsold tickets immediately before the event. “This will not only ultimately reduce the cost of tickets due to savings on intermediaries (box office and distributors), but also in a certain way regulate sales volumes in one hand, introducing relatively objective criteria for purchasing a certain number of tickets for “personal” needs, and keeping statistics returns by specific “consumers”, increase tax efficiency in the entertainment sector. It is this transparency that may, over time, become the basis for a dialogue with the authorities on the introduction of special regulation of ticket return rules and restrictions related to reimbursement of costs to unscrupulous consumers,” the expert adds.

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In St. Petersburg they offer to sell concert tickets using your passport