My ticket to a £150 rip-off

Last week, my 13-year-old daughter Sasha and her friend Tess were taken by her god-father, Sean, to see Catfish and the Bottlemen at the Wembley Arena. I bought the tickets myself on Viagogo, one of the biggest secondary ticketing websites, and had no reason to think they wouldn’t be valid. As a QPR season-ticket holder, I’ve used Viagogo in the past to resell tickets to home games and it’s worked fine.

Not on this occasion. I knew some-thing was wrong when I received a message from Sean asking me to email him a picture of my driving licence. The concert organisers were refusing to admit anyone who’d bought their ticket via a reseller, so if you couldn’t prove you were the person named on the ticket you couldn’t get in. The name on their tickets was ‘Shael Pilcher’ so a picture of my driving licence wasn’t any use. They were refused entry along with hundreds of others. Not wanting to disappoint Sasha, Sean bought three new late-release tickets at the box office and they were able to go to the concert, but others weren’t so lucky. He reported seeing dozens of teenage girls in tears outside the venue.

Sean paid half as much as I had because the reseller had listed them for more than their face value of £22, but Viagogo is only partially at fault here. I say ‘partially’, because the reseller chooses what price to sell the tickets at, not the website. On the other hand, the 2015 Consumer Rights Act says that sites like Viagogo have to publish the face value of the tickets being resold and they didn’t do that in this case.