Fans furious at inflated prices for Ticketmaster Resale ticketsClaire Siracusa
The Age
10 August 2017Tickets for the highly-anticipated Geelong-Richmond clash at Simonds Stadium, which has a capacity of 34,000, are being sold at up to four times their face value via Ticketmaster's official resale website, leaving fans furious.
While single tickets to the Saturday afternoon clash are still available to the public via Ticketmaster's regular portal, including reserved seat tickets that cost no more than $85 before fees, the only tickets available in multiples are general admission tickets, which do not guarantee a seat.
This means fans wanting to buy multiple reserved seat tickets, seated together, must resort to the Ticketmaster Resale site, where some tickets are being sold at four times their face-value price.
General admission tickets were also being sold at inflated prices on Ticketmaster Resale, including some at more than four times the face value price, putting the resale ticket price, before fees, at more than $100. Some ticket prices on the resale portal were raised by only a few dollars.
Prices on the Ticketmaster Resale site are set by the seller of the tickets, but Ticketmaster charges a delivery fee whether a ticket is digital or not.
Delivery for PDF tickets sent by email is $3.95 per transaction, based on ticket type. A delivery fee of $17.90 per transaction applies for tickets sent by post.
Footy fans were unhappy with the system, with journalist Shane McInnes' tweet, describing the situation as "legal scalping", prompting some angry responses.
Others still were looking at the bigger picture.
But some were more circumspect, pointing out that people buy from the resale site at their own risk.
Many Richmond fans in particular have expressed their displeasure at the number of people who will likely be shut out of the small Geelong stadium.
AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan said home and away games were "affordably priced".
"We don't like scalping. We don't condone it, and for certain games it's illegal," he said on Thursday.
"For our home and away games, our games are affordably priced, you can get in for $25 if there is capacity.
"[Scalping] is only an issue in the exceptional game."
McLachlan also explained the decision to fixture the game in Geelong.
"Well it's a Geelong home game. That's their home venue. I think people understand that. They have a first-class facility down there. That's where they play the majority of their games.
"I think they play three or four games in Melbourne.
"With full availability of the venue down there rather than it being unavailable for six or seven rounds that game may have been fixtured as a big game at the MCG.
"[We] make decisions based on the previous year's form about which of the three or four are played in town."
Earlier this week, interim AFL football operations boss Andrew Dillon admitted if the fixture was drawn up now, Richmond wouldn't be playing Geelong at Simonds Stadium.
"Just by the Victorian opponents Geelong have had this year, it's fallen that Richmond, which would normally be a game at the 'G, had to be one of the games they played at Skilled Stadium because they also had games against some of the larger Victorian clubs that they've played at the MCG," Dillon said on SEN radio.
"And that was probably taking into account Richmond's performance last year, which obviously when you look in a lens now with Richmond in the top four, you probably wouldn't have fixtured it there but when the fixture was done in October last year, that was the call that was made."
Ticketmaster has been contacted for comment.
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