The Great American Beer Festival responds to complaints about a growing secondary market (scalpers, etc) for tickets to the Denver, Colorado event. It took just 20 minutes to sell out off all 79,000 plus tickets this year.
Hi Everyone. We’re reading your comments, and we hear your frustration about scalpers and the secondary market. We share those concerns and wish there was a feasible fix. Unfortunately, there’s no perfect way to successfully avoid a secondary market for hot tickets–whether for popular concerts, sporting events or festivals like the GABF.
There are measures in place to decrease access for scalpers, including ticket limits we set for GABF ticket purchases (enforced by Ticketmaster), and Ticketmaster’s anti-bot and other security measures. Does this prevent scalper access? No, but it does decrease it. We will continue to evaluate options and solutions going forward.
What about you? How would you handle folks who purchase tickets solely for the resale value? Many individuals were locked out of the opportunity to purchase tickets, seconds after logging on. Re-sellers are asking up to 5x the original face value. A few instances, these tickets were posted within an hour of the link going live.
Sound off. What would you change?
Easy. No physical ticket. Associate the drivers licence or state ID number with a ticket purchase. By forcing any reselling to be done through the ticket provider in a single pool you can effectively kill any kind of scalping.
I got on exactly at 10 and didn’t get anything.