Comment by oehpr
2 years ago
I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.
But I mean, obviously, any kind of system like this strikes me as the same sort of thing as DRM. That you can somehow protect the message from the person you're sharing the message to. How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser? It just seemes ridiculous on its face.
Yup exactly. Some events are pretty bad at opening the doors early. The Brooklyn Nets seem to open 30 minutes before the game, so they need to get 20,000 people through 20 metal detectors in 30 minutes. Every second extra they add to the process is a second you don't have to buy a $25 drink, and that's how they make their money.
We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.
> or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.
Don't they already do that anyway? Every time I've gotten on a plane for work purposes, there was no differentiation between "business traveler" v. "leisure traveler" as far as the ticket purchasing process was concerned. Hell, in the most recent case it was even with my own credit card (for which I submitted an expense report to be reimbursed) - so for all the airline knew, I was just taking a week-long vacation to Colorado Springs (in that case) instead of being there for work.
The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night. Business travelers go home on Friday night. (SFO-NYC on Friday night was always a tough flight to book. I usually stayed the extra night so I could fly 1st or Business for less money.)
If you could buy someone else's ticket on the secondary market, then you could do a split ticket thing where you both stay Saturday night but neither of you actually do.
Everyone should change their name to Pat Smith and end this scam once and for all.
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>We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.
Sorry, what? Surely business travelers pay more just by virtue of traveling by business class? Or, if travel through business portals was consistently significantly more expensive than just buying the ticket directly on the airline's website, businesses would just start buying tickets directly from the airline's website?
Is there something about how ticket fares are calculated and paid that I don't understand?
Last minute / next day fares have traditionally been far more expensive than 3 week advance, and that was intended to impact business travel more than leisure. If there was a 3rd party marketplace for airline tickets, last minute tickets would not be nearly as expensive and the airlines would make far less money.
Consider an example where we have a business traveler "Bob" and a leisure traveler "Larry". Bob needs to get to LAX tomorrow to put out a fire at a client site. Larry has a trip booked to LAX tomorrow, but can't go because he's sick. Larry has paid $500 for the trip 3 weeks ago.
Today: Larry cancels his trip, and maybe, if he's lucky, gets an airline credit for the original price of the trip that expires in a year and which may be hard to use for his next trip. When he cancels, a seat opens up on the plane, and the airline sells it to Bob for $1200.
If resale was permitted: Larry auctions off his ticket at an airline ticket reseller. He gets $700 from Bob. So if resale was permitted, Bob's business saves $500, and Larry makes $200, and the airline looses $1200-$1700. You can see why they hate resale.
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Business travelers != travelers in business class.
Airlines use a fair number of techniques to price discriminate between leisure and business passengers.
Yeah, I don't think that's right either. They don't check your ID at the gate, it's just TSA that checks your id (if you have one).
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So even if you don't want to do the ID thing, there are alternatives that you see all over the place (like venmo) Have a rotating QR code seeded with a unique to the user id. Then with ticket master, require a login to buy tickets. Register the tickets to the ID and then do the lookup with a combination of the ticket id, rotating qr code, and the user id.
That requires the admitter device to send the challenge back to HQ, but that shouldn't really be much of a challenge. Tickets then become linked to the user's account (perhaps you allow transfer).
This is effectively what Disney does with their ticketing system, along with at the gate them taking a picture of you so they can confirm "Yes, so and so looks like the photo".
But yeah, all of this is ridiculous on its face as the cheaper and easier solution is ticket plus ID. If you are worried about flow have signs up before check in that say "be sure to have your ID ready before you get to the counter".
The ticketmaster solutions are just bad/half assed.
That is to say, if ticketmater had just done TOPS like the article points out, you'd not need the headache they've created with needing a live internet connection to load your ticket.
Disney is collecting pictures of everyone faces. That's pretty creepy.
They only collected my fingerprint last time I went.
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You don't understand how people at their companies evaluate stuff like this.
Any solution that increases capital or operating expenditures for them or the venues (half of whom they own, if I remember correctly?) is a non-starter if it doesn't generate some increase in revenue.
They will not do anything they don't have to do if it means any impact to their bottom line whatsoever.
We see it as "pennies per transaction."
They see it as "we sell 500M tickets per year so five cents per transaction is $25M/year in lost net."
Well that's where I'd argue they are negatively impacting their bottom line.
> These rotating barcodes on the other hand are far from perfect. I experienced this first-hand last year when I attended another very popular concert where they used a similar rotating-QR-code-ticket system. Numerous people including myself and my friends were floundering at the entry gate citing a bevy of broken barcode problems. ...
> The venue was so crowded that cell-towers and WiFi were overloaded. Internet access was spottier than a Dalmatian with chickenpox.
That is impact to their bottom line. They have admittees waiting at the gate blocking other people from getting in cutting into their concession sales.
If they'd used a bog standard TOPS system (like the op suggests) that would not be an issue at all. But instead because they have the dumb system where you reach out to the ticket master servers to get your code, they've created their own nightmare.
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> Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.
But they in turn greatly degraded the flow of traffic by forcing the use of a proprietary always-online app which fails to load when your cellular connection is less-than-ideal. Verifying a photo ID would probably be faster.
True, but when you point out practical realities like this to monopolistic institutions, they don't have to care.
They will instead ask "well why isn't the connection good at the concert? What can we do to fix that?" (ie. "we don't have to change when we can make you change")
It IS true that if you don't have to verify the ID of the ticket holder then admissions will go much faster. So long as they can make that plausible sales pitch, they can use it as justification for whatever byzantine DRM system they can dream up.
> How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser?
A ticket scalper cannot know the names of the people that will later purchase his tickets. So connecting each ticket to a name prevents scalpers.