There are very few industries in modern business that provide less of a service than ticketing companies. Their only job is to sell you a ticket to an event, and then provide it in time for you to attend. One would think, in fact, that this would be a business that naturally lent itself to competition — after all, for such a ridiculously simple service, one would have to do something to differentiate yourself — except in the business of ticketing, the only competition appears to be “who can make this experience worse.”
SeatGeek? Barely-functional. AXS? A truly awful company, and one that does not appear to let you buy single tickets to Las Vegas Knights games. Stubhub will let anyone list anything for any price in any part of the stadium without requiring any proof that they have the tickets, something that they will remedy by refunding the tickets and saying “sorry.” GameTime has carved out a niche as “the company that will let you sell your tickets last minute,” meaning they can do the job you pay them for.
And that’s the unifying problem with the ticketing industry — absolutely none of these companies provide anything other than a service that, in many cases, they fundamentally fail to provide. There are many more ticket services — VividTickets, SITickets, and so on — that have absolutely no differentiation other than “we also sell tickets.”
Oh, pardon me, there is one differentiator: the insane amounts of fees that these companies can choose to charge because at no point has anyone in the government ever considered that perhaps…
