Heather du Plessis-Allan: I can't wait to see what comes out of the Oasis ticketing fiasco

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

I'm going to be fascinated to see what comes of the Oasis ticketing fiasco in the UK - but I imagine it would be nothing.

What's happened is that Oasis tickets went on sale this weekend for as low as $280, but after spending hours in the online queues to get the tickets, they were $710 by the time people got to buy them - plus fees on top of that.
And people are furious. Because what a lot of people don’t realise is that Ticketmaster uses what's called 'dynamic pricing'.

It works like Uber's surge pricing - when no one wants to buy the tickets, they're cheap. When everyone wants to buy them from around the world, they jack up the price.
It's just basic supply and demand.
The Government over in the UK heard how upset people got and have now promised a review of it - and this is where I think it’ll get interesting.
What are they going to find, that Ticketmaster's done something wrong here?
Plenty of businesses do this. I just named Uber, the price for hotels goes up on the weekends, prices for resorts in Fiji go up in the school holidays, airlines raise their prices the fewer and fewer seats they have left on a flight - the more people want, the fewer things are available, so they jack up the prices.
So you probably can’t argue they’re doing anything wrong in jacking up the Oasis ticket prices
There may be an argument that they're doing something wrong by not being transparent about it. They're not telling you they’re doing it, they're not telling you how they're doing it - and maybe you can argue there.

But is forcing them to be transparent going to bring the price down? Probably not.
The fact is, people from around the world tried to buy Oasis tickets on Saturday night - it was in demand.
As much as I hate being ripped off, can we really argue Ticketmaster did anything wrong here?

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