There are websites like priceline or expedia that get you deals on last minute hotels and travel.
So is there a website that has deeply discounted live event tickets, ie if the regular ticket was $30 but the concert is tomorrow and there are still unsold seats, you can get them for $15?
The websites I’ve found so far aren’t last minute, and the tickets are the same price as if you buy them from ticketmaster.
Checkout ebay and stubhub.com which I’m pretty sure is run by ebay. I’ve gotten some good deals off ebay in the past.
Oh BTW, depending on the venue and the seller, last minute tickets can be delivered electronically (print them out), picked-up somewhere locally, or picked up at the will-call window.
There are often deals to be had, but if it’s an in-demand event, obviously the chances of finding deals are slim.
StubHub consists of private parties selling their unwanted tickets, so it tends to be market-driven. Many sellers probably do choose to cut their asking price as the event nears, but it’s not a given.
I was recently at a concert and there were tons of empty seats. So I figure/hope somewhere someone is selling those seats at a deep discount the day before the concert. Getting someone to pay $20 for a $40 seat is better than leaving it empty.
Last year I went to about 10-20 phillies games and always paid a lot less than face value (including world series tickets).
My methodology is this:
wait for friends to give them to me for free (there’s always people who can’t dump them that don’t want it to go to waste)
go on stubhub. Now they have alerts (finally) but I would the day of the event monitor every 5/10 minutes hoping to snipe a ticket that someone places at an outageously low price. Sometimes demand is bigger than supply and the tickets all go, but that’s only happened once for opening day. Usually 3 hours before the event there is a firesale (2 hours before it shuts down).
craigslist. < 2 hours before the game there are tons of “I’m tailgating at section K7 with an extra ticket, stop by”.
I’ve gotten cut-rate tickets on the sidewalk in front of the venue several times, from would-be scalpers who guessed wrong about demand. I’ve also had strangers hand me tickets for free on a few occasions.
If you show up at the venue right at showtime, the “street brokers” are usually in fire sale mode. Also, people who bought tickets for friends or dates that didn’t show up are likely to be getting rid of extras for cheap or even free.