Fans deserve fair access to World Series tickets

This column originally appeared on Cleveland.com on November 6th, 2016: http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/11/fans_deserve_fair_access_to_wo.html

Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs fans were living their dreams last week with a historic matchup in the World Series. But for these endlessly patient fans, it wasn't easy to get tickets to the games. And not just because of high demand, but also due to the teams' restrictive ticket policies.

For example, a Cleveland fan's World Series tickets were canceled after he resold some of his tickets to the earlier playoff rounds in violation of the team's season-ticket-holder agreement.

Even if these kinds of terms are made clear to customers, why does this cancellation policy even exist? 

In Chicago, the Cubs' policy that requires one of the most popular resale exchange websites to stop selling tickets six hours before games led to fans scurrying elsewhere to buy available tickets.

This isn't just a story about this World Series. Related practices are occurring across the country in every sport. A season ticket holder in Miami had his Marlins season tickets canceled earlier this year when he resold tickets he couldn't use. He reported to our organization that he did this through his account web page hosted by the team. The site didn't prevent him from reselling. Instead, upon renewing his season tickets he was told that his account was canceled.

The primary ticket market, comprised of teams, venues, artists, and large corporate ticket issuers, is restricting the purchase, sale and transfer of tickets, which punishes the most vested fans.

In an open market, if you purchase a ticket, you can do whatever you would like with it, including selling it for less or more than you paid, depending on what the market and demand will bear.

Yet powerful players in the multibillion-dollar primary market are moving to seize this choice and control from ticket holders and professional secondary market resellers in the name of more profit.

Another dangerous trend is the use of restrictive so-called paperless ticketing. It's pitched as a convenience for fans or as a way to fight some phony ticket scheme. In practice, paperless ticketing means showing up in person and waiting in line with the credit card and corresponding ID used to purchase the tickets. Very often venues cannot handle "paperless tickets," since it pushes ticket holders to wait in endless lines at will-call instead of a using a print-at-home ticket.

Just look at what happened earlier this month at an Adele concert in Toronto. A thousand fans reportedly were waiting in hours long lines in the rain because the paperless system failed.

It's not about convenience, obviously, and it's not about fraud prevention. It's about preventing you from giving away or selling your ticket if you want to, at the price you choose to accept, on a website of your choosing.

Speaking of websites, teams also often try to corral all resale into their own proprietary exchanges, where ticket holders can be captive to added fees above and beyond what they already paid initially, and minimum resale prices that don't consider actual market value.

These are some of the unfair practices that our organization's 200 member companies see spreading across the country. While there are teams who recognize the value of the secondary market and ticket transferability in order to drive and maximize attendance, they are in a growing minority.

The Indians season-ticket-holder policy forbids the reselling more than 50 percent of tickets. 

The intent behind this policy is unknown, but, regardless, it's not fair. Whether it's one game's worth of tickets, or every game, the team was paid full price for the package. Imagine if car dealerships suddenly but restrictions on the future resale of a car, or required car owners to only resell their cars back at the dealership and at minimum prices the dealer sets – it wouldn't take long for the public to demand change.

Actions to restrict the purchase, sale and transfer of tickets like these by the Indians and other teams lack transparency, harm open-market competition, and punish the most vested ticket holders. It is no wonder fans are speaking out and want these practices to end. This is a central mission of the Protect Ticket Rights campaign, an initiative seeking to advance solutions to ensure harmful practices in the ticketing system do not get worse.

Gary Adler is executive director and counsel of the National Association of Ticket Brokers, which represents ticket brokers who desired to establish an industrywide standard of conduct and to create ethical rules and procedures to protect the public.