Ticketmaster “may have misleaded oasis fans” with unclear prices when he put his reunion tour for sale last year, the Watchdog of the United Kingdom competition said.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said that the company may have violated the consumer protection law by selling “Platinum” tickets for almost 2.5 times the standard price, without explaining that they had no additional advantage.
“It risked giving consumers the misleading impression that Platinum tickets were better,” he said in an update of his investigation into Ticketmaster.
The CMA says that it is looking for changes to the way the ticket platform gives customers information and how it does. Ticketmaster has not yet responded to the report.
More than 900,000 tickets were sold for the long -awaited reunion tour of Oasis last summer.
But many fans have been excluded from their pocket, when standard standing tickets announced to £ 135 more fees and were re -stated “in demand” and changed on Ticketmaster at £ 355 plus costs.
Ticketmaster subsequently denied having used “dynamic prices” to manipulate prices.
“We do not change the prices in an automated or algorithmic manner,” said the British director of the company, Andrew Parsons last month.
He argued that all prices are determined by teams of artists and promoters – although, in the case of Oasis, the promoter, SJM Concerts, has links with the parent company of Ticketmaster, Live Nation.
The CMA did not comment on the question of dynamic pricing, but said that Ticketmaster made it difficult for oasis fans to make “informed choices”.
For example, he said, customers did not know that there were “two categories of standing tickets at different prices, all the cheaper standing tickets sold first”.
This resulted in “many fans waiting in a long queue without understanding what they would pay, then having to decide to pay a higher price than expected,” continued the CMA.
The guard dog acknowledged that Ticketmaster had made some modifications to its commercial practices since the sale of Oasis last August.
However, he said that “the AMC does not currently consider these sufficient changes to respond to his concerns”.
“We are now expecting Ticketmaster to work with us to respond to these concerns so that, in the future, fans can make well informed decisions when buying tickets,” said Hayley Fletcher, principal director of consumer protection.
The BBC contacted Ticketmaster for a response to the CMA report.
The Oasis tour should launch the stadium of the Cardiff principality on July 4, 2025.
