Anyone With Ticketcity Experience?

[DraftChrisLong]

I bought two club level seats from ticket city.  Started to get an uneasy feeling about having valid tickets so I followed Marks Guide to FedEx and entered them into www.ticketexchangebyticketmaster.com.   Sure enough when I enter the barcode it tells me "The barcode entered is not found or invalid."

 

I called TicketCity who says since they are a ticket reseller the tickets are reissued to them via TicketMaster and although the tickets say invalid on the marketplace they will work at the gate.

 

Has anyone else had this issue or experience with tickets from TicketCity

[Mark The Homer]

Hi,

 

No I haven't dealt with ticket city. 

 

Are your tickets hard tickets or scans?

 

The industry has changed quite a bit over the past year.  If you bought the tickets from eBay, I would imagine they are tickets that ticketcity controls.  If you bought it from the site directly, it probably is not.  But nonetheless, it is from within the industry network, so it is almost certainly good. 

 

Either way, it should be a good ticket.  I'm not sure why it wouldn't come up as legit when checked with the ticket exchange ticket master site.  Maybe you have a pdf and only hard tickets are legitimized on the site?  I don't know. 

[ggarriso]

MTH - out of pure curiosity is there a thread anywhere detailing how the industry has changed over the last year? got cliffnotes?

[Mark The Homer]

I haven't updated the ticket post since last year. 

 

In short, it appears the industry is trying to achieve a kind of cooperation, so that, as a whole, they can minimize the competition between themselves (the brokers), and thereby, keep prices high.  In other words, they want to organize the industry to operate like a monopoly as much as possible.  They do this by selling every ticket as if it is a network ticket.  For example, you go to ascticket to buy a Redskins ticket, but you don't know if it's a ticket held by asc or if it's an industry network ticket and asc is acting as middle man.  And they won't necessarily tell you.  You'll pay the same fees and they'll give you a pdf - not the hard ticket - even if they hold the hard ticket inhouse. 

 

The only way to beat this, that I know of, is to specifically look for these brokers selling on eBay (or some other non-ticket-industry site).  I believe if you see a broker selling a ticket on eBay, it will almost certainly be a ticket he controls.  And if you find such a ticket, it gives you the possibility of negotiating a lower price. 

 

But for the most part, it's no longer possible to go to a site like ascticket.com and buy a ticket controlled by that company - or if you do, it will be by accident and you won't know it.  There are a few exceptions with some of the smaller brokers who have not yet fallen in line, though.  But I believe in the long term, they will.

 

Meanwhile, stubhub has eliminated their service fees and shipping fees for this year.  That makes buying so much easier, even if the fees are worked into the price of the tickets.  But you'd still be wise to check any tickets you're tempted to buy with some other site, such as ticketgeek.  You may save a few bucks buying from another site, even if you have to pay for fees and shipping.

 

The nice thing about stubhub, though, is you also have a lot of tickets being sold by season ticket holders, which means you can actually purchase a hard ticket and it will be mailed to you.  That's nice.  I like the hard tickets.  Buying industry tix will almost always result in a pdf.  Another advantage is the seller may purposely price his ticket to sell (i.e. a lower price), so you can find deals if you look often.  A third advantage is that they have a window at fedexfield, so if the scan doesn't work, you can probably get it straightened out right there at the stubhub window.

 

Hope this helps.

[ggarriso]

So informative.. thanks brother!

[DraftChrisLong]

They are PDF tickets.  The customer service rep from TicketCity explained that the barcodes were authentic to the TicketCity site.

 

I guess we will see on Monday