StubHub is in the crosshairs of Luke Combs fans this week after multiple fans were left locked out of a Jacksonville performance by the country star over the weekend. The reselling giant apologized to impacted consumers, and promised to make things right with them.
“We deeply regret that some of our customers were unable to get into Friday night’s Luke Combs show, but we are resolving this for every customer who was impacted, as is provided by the StubHub FanProtect Guarantee,” a spokesperson for StubHub told TicketNews. “We contacted fans impacted to offer a 200% credit, so they could buy tickets for the event Saturday if they were able to attend. While we further investigate the issue, we’ve suspended the sellers responsible.”
Local media covered the ticketing issues, which reportedly impacted enough event attendees to be categorized as the worst ever rash of invalid tickets by Combs’ management.
It is unclear whether or not issues were also experienced on Saturday during the second show of Combs’ run at the Jacksonville venue. After Friday, the singer’s manager told local news they would be on the lookout for any fans experiencing similar problems.
“We are very much making sure everyone is taken care of tonight. We’ll be on high alert for the scammers. We’ll be looking out for it.,” said Chris Kappy, Combs’ manager.
As of Tuesday, there is not a specific reason that has been given for what caused the issues experienced on Friday. The concert promoter confirmed that there were no hardware or software issues taking place on Friday at Everbank Stadium.
“So, the current issues that we’re having with StubHub is we purchased tickets through them for the Luke Combs concert here, and when we got to the gate we’re being told that they need to be through the AXS app, in which case we were told to contact StubHub,” one concertgoer told First Coast News. “Nothing seems to be getting done and we can’t seem to find a result for our tickets and we spent a good bit of money coming here.”
This means that the sellers in question likely either send the consumers who purchased tickets that later wound up being denied entry either provided counterfeit tickets in some form, or the tickets themselves had been revoked prior to the consumers reaching the venue entry.
The latter has frequently been the cause of consumer ticket issues at events in several instances, as concert promoters have taken to using restrictive technology like “paperless” tickets or mobile-only systems with rotating barcodes in an attempt to restrict consumer ticket resale and transfer. In one famous incident, hundreds of fans were locked out of a Black Keys show in Los Angeles when the promoter turned off ticket transfer and invalidated the otherwise valid tickets customers showed up with simply because they had been resold.
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The act of cancelling resold tickets or denying entry to consumers who hold otherwise valid tickets has been done in several instances, with artists and promoters insisting that they are attempting to protect consumers from paying higher prices on ticket resale marketplaces. Ed Sheeran’s management famously did so on numerous occasions on previous tours, inviting fans who had purchased tickets through the viagogo (StubHub’s parent company) marketplace to self-identify outside of the venue, only to see their tickets voided and the customers sent to the box office to re-purchase the same or similar tickets.
Such tactics have been made illegal in several U.S. states, but efforts to pass a federal law to protect consumers in the same fashion have run into the buzzsaw that is Live Nation Entertainment’s lobbying apparatus.
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StubHub, for its part, stressed that invalid ticket issues are extremely rare on its platform. Data across multiple North American ticket resale marketplaces shows that such fraud occurs at a rate of less than one in one hundred transactions. Sellers found to be committing such crimes are banned from the marketplace, and marketplace guarantees typically provide consumers with a full refund or a replacement ticket, depending on when the behavior is identified.
