Features
Twickets Founder Richard Davies On The Need For Ethical Ticket Resale
There are a few ticketing companies out there recognizing the need to resell your ticket while making sure no one get ripped off in the process. Resale activity has reached a peak, now that events are returning, and postponed shows are finally going ahead. But the new dates for those shows may not work for some fans, who’ll be happy to pass their ticket on to other fans who went away empty handed during the original on sale.
Most will be happy to get the money they originally spent back in full, i.e. including booking fees, they’re not out to make a profit. That’s where capped resale platforms come in. Twickets is one of them, allowing fans to resell their tickets at the original face-value price. Adding booking fees paid by the original buyer on top of that is optional.
The year before the pandemic, Twickets supplied ticketing services for some 25,000 different events across all genres, from concerts to sports to venues. That number is guaranteed to increase, now that the industry’s returning in addition to a huge backlog of events that couldn’t take place in 2020/2021, Twickets founder Richard Davies told Pollstar.
He said ticket buyers were very aware that there were face-value resale platforms out there. “If you strip out the professional brokers, the touts, and you look at genuine fans, more people are now listing on capped platforms than on uncapped platforms,” he said.
Twickets own data on all key market players shows that the for-profit secondary platforms are being regularly outperformed by those capping the resale price. In addition the data shows that of all the ethical platforms, including those of the primary ticket retailers, Twickets is the most popular destination.
Twickets offers an alert system for fans who came away empty-handed in the onsale. It alerts them via email or push notification as soon as tickets become available from fans, who cannot make the event in question after all. The second option is for buyers to make below-face-value offers for a ticket. Sellers will accept once they determine that they won’t get more for it.
The need for ethical resale is particularly high after these past two years of restrictions. Many people have been holding on to their tickets even as events got postponed multiple times. It’s no surprise that there’ll be many who cannot make the new dates. According to Davies, resale activity was “really reaching a crescendo, and has demonstrated the value of resale more than any other time in our history.”