Asia News: Coldplay Adds Shows; Tix Show Up on Black Market; Hong Kong Disneyland Boosts Prices

KOREA

Coldplay Adds Fifth, Sixth Shows

After tickets for its four scheduled concerts next April at Goyang Stadium in Gyeonggi, South Korea, sold out in a matter of minutes, Coldplay added two shows April 24-25, according to the concert organizer Live Nation Korea.

The additions give Coldplay six concerts on the Korean leg of the band’s “Music of the Spheres” tour.

Opening acts and “mystery guests” have been promised for the shows.
It will be Coldplay’s first appearance in Korea in eight years.

INDIA

Coldplay Tix On Black Market?

Police in Mumbai are asking the CEO of the platform selling tickets to Coldplay’s sold-out stops in the city next spring to provide a statement after they received complaints from people who said that tickets had ended up on the black market, according to Reuters.

The concerts will take place “on the outskirts of Mumbai” in January. Tickets for the first two shows “sold out within minutes of going on sale Sept. 22,” with hundreds of thousands of fans unable to purchase any.

Several hours later, tickets started appearing on secondary sites for up to 10 times their face value.

Police are investigating the ticket platform BookMyShow, which later released a statement on X saying it had nothing to do with other platforms that resell tickets.

It warned fans that any tickets bought on secondary markets could very well be fake.

Police requested that BookMyShow’s CEO, Ashish Hemrajani, give a formal statement, though Reuters said that neither side responded to requests for comment. Local media reported that prior to summoning Hemrajani – for the second time – the police Economic Offenses Wing had issued a summons for the COO of Big Tree Entertainment, the company that owns BookMyShow. The COO was reportedly questioned for four hours.

It’s estimated that 10 million individuals were waiting online for the 150,000 available tickets. A quickly added show sold out immediately as well.

The idea that BookMyShow may not have been entirely transparent in how they distributed tickets is not new.

Startup News reports that another Indian ticketing platform, Zomato, has been scrutinized for handling the tickets for a popular Indian artist whose tour sold out as quickly as Coldplay’s did, with the result being the same thing: thousands of tickets ending up on scalping websites.

Though BookMyShow had itself filed a police complaint about the unauthorized resale of Coldplay tickets, some media accused the company of doing so to “dodge allegations” that
it had somehow arranged the sale of tickets for the scalpers’ benefit, an accusation that concert insiders refute as being preposterous.

Consequently, BookMyShow has pledged to cooperate with police, but nevertheless, the CEO of the company did not respond to the first summons.

In the Zomato case, the company issued a formal notice to the secondary platform for reselling tickets without authorization, though some people think they were just trying to cover themselves for lax operations.

HONG KONG

Disneyland Boosts Prices, Offers Some Discounts

Hong Kong Disneyland announced last month that it was increasing admission prices for the theme park by up to 13%.

However, in order to offset some of these increases, the park is also offering “limited-time discounts for groups and annual pass holders,” according to the website Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia.

In other Disney news, Shanghai Disney Resort is launching a “real name” ticketing policy.
Each guest will be required to use their government-issued ID in order to book a ticket for themselves. Government ID will also be required to purchase a ticket on the day of entrance.

Almost all Chinese-run tourist attractions on the mainland require ID when buying tickets, and have so for a number of years. The main purpose was to prevent scalping. This is the first time that a third-party attraction will be asked to follow the system.