It appears that Ticketmaster is once again ripping off the consumer by selling all of the decent seats to large ticket brokers before they actually go on sale to the general public.
Myself and three other parents went online to Ticketmaster one week before the tickets to Hannah Montana's Atlanta concert went on sale. The Ticketmaster website advertised that the tickets for the Atlanta show would go on sale 9/15/07 at 10:00 A.M.
The website also stated that consumers could get in on presale tickets by paying 30.00 dollars and joining the Hannah Montana fan club. One of the moms did this, and after joining, the fan club site said no tickets were available, all sold out. This is a rip-off.
We all waited for the general sale on Saturday at 10:00 A.M. to roll around. One of us sat at home on the computer to try to buy online, and three other parents went to the Publix grocery store Ticketmaster locations to stand in line. Publix told us that if we got there early enough, they would be issuing numbers for queuing up. Two moms showed up very early and got numbers two and six in line. We thought, great, that means we have a good chance of securing tickets. When 10:00 A.M. rolled around, only the first two people out of 30 in line got tickets. The first person got two tickets and the second person got four. All the others were out of luck, as they were told all were sold out.
I was online 30 minutes before the 10:00 A.M. start time, and right at 10:00 I attempted to buy four tickets and got the "none available" message. I tried every other combination of tickets and got the same message.
I called other Publix stores around metro Atlanta, and all of them said all the tickets were sold on a presale basis and very few people were able to buy tickets that morning at the Ticketmaster outlet.
Ticketmaster needs to be dealt with legally for scalping tickets to large brokers. The general public never has a shot at tickets online or at their kiosk. If you want tickets, you have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to take your kids. Looking at a number of broker sites, the tickets to Hannah Montana are ranging from 150.00 to 4,677.00 per ticket.
I do not know anyone in their right mind who would pay 4,677.00 per ticket to take their 11-year-old to see Hannah Montana.
Something needs to be done to stop the practice of scalping. These kids who watch Hannah's show every day and put her on the radar to fame are the ones being left out of her concert.
Ticketmaster is a monopoly that needs to be stopped, and we need to create competition for them.
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