Often times you dont know who is going when you buy the tickets, how many you are going to get or if the seats are any good. Asking people to be more responsible amd plan ahead and keep to a plan is unrealistic. This is not an airline ticket, its supposed to be fun and is often time spontaneous.
And concerts dont have TSA style people checking IDs at the door. The door people are minium wage temps, and you expect them to enforce complicated rules concerning IDs? Are they going to deal with pissed off customers being turned away. That is a good recipe for a riot. Drunken and high people being turned away from a party they have a legit ticket to go? Thats going to go over well
There’s your problem. That’s the minimum I’d expect.
I assume they are checking that tickets are legit, how much more skill is required to check an id or compare a photo against the person in front of them?
I assume they already have to do that for those without a valid ticket
why would anyone be getting turned away unless they had an invalid ticket?
That isn’t a legitimate ticket then is it? as it doesn’t have their name on it. I’d assume that clearly stated on the ticket would be “invalid if matching id not produced” or something similar.
The blame, if there is any, seems to lie with the person who bailed at the last moment.
As others have already noted, you could do it, but the nature of how people use (and want to use, and have traditionally used) concert tickets today doesn’t fit well with a non-transferable ticket.
If mrs. dirtball and I had a pair of thousand-dollar tickets (or however much they would be) to the Rolling Stones Farewell Tour and then, day of show, my boss is suddenly demanding that I write an emergency TPS report that’ll require an all-nighter, I’d be highly incensed if mrs. couldn’t pick up the phone and call her friend Dottie to offer her my ticket. If I can’t use it, there’s no sensible reason why someone else shouldn’t be able to.
ETA: And yes, I would be aware that the tickets are non-transerable at the time of purchase. That doesn’t make it go down any easier when the emergency TPS comes up.
Yeah, it likely would, but it would then create the different problem of making it difficult (if not impossible) for legitimate, non-scalping transfers of tickets.
I was thinking of a system that would allow you to transfer the tickets, perhaps by going to a website and providing the driver’s license number of the recipient, but I’ll bet that the scalpers would figure out a way to use this to resell tickets.
Why? I can transfer an airline ticket to another person for a small (or in some cases not so small fee) You could even pay a small amount extra up front to allow you to transfer it for no further extra fee.
Sure, any additional steps required might act as a disincentive to people buying speculative tickets, or getting more than they need but I don’t see that as a massive problem. If it leaves more for those who are defintely going to go and are capable of the most minimal organsation then that seems like a win to me.
My understanding is that a non-transferable airline ticket is exactly that – no, you can’t transfer it to another person.
You can do that with transferable airline tickets (which are apparently not particularly common, at least not here in the U.S.), but those are not the same thing.
I have tried to transfer plane tickets in the past and couldn’t do it. Something about them being non-transferable after 9/11.
Concerts are events that are supposed to be fun. What next, sit in your assigned seats at all times? It’s not how large groups of people want it to be, especially younger groups like Taylor Swift fans.
Hijack, but I remember a story of a guy (I think Canadian) who had bought tickets for him and his girlfriend to go to Europe but then he broke up with her, so he was looking for another person with the same name to go with instead.
OK, to be clear, when I talk about an airline ticket being “non-transferable” I mean that you cannot simply give it to another person and they walk onto the plane. It is booked under a specific name and requires confirmation via ID.
They are often transferable in the sense that, for a fee, the details can be changed and the ticket then passed on to another specified person. That would be the same process I propose for concert tickets.
Which might make me less inclined to buy tickets . I have partial season tickets for baseball ( which I buy directly from the team ) . To buy playoff tickets I had to buy a strip of multiple games before the dates were even known. No way am I spending over a thousand dollars on those tickets if can’t transfer them.
Some are transferable in that sense and others aren’t . And the fees for a name change are around $150 - and that’s to change the spelling of a name (for example from Jon to John) , not to change the person.
Ah, well maybe this is something that has changed (I’ve never had to try to do it) and they are indeed no longer transferable in that sense.
Sounds like the Taylor Swift fans are getting the raw end of the deal under the current system anyway. No harm in batting around better ways of doing things.
My understanding is, at least with the U.S. air carriers, no, you aren’t generally allowed to do this.
But, getting back to the point of the thread, Ticketmaster already provides this exact service for at least some of the tickets they handle (such as NFL tickets), but one can also sell them (or give them) to a third party, without getting Ticketmaster involved.
You are right, it seems like my experience is a little out of date. I confess I leave the airline bookings to my hyper-organised wife for personal travel and my admin for work travel.