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Why We’re Switching to a Will-Call Only Venue

Last month, a patron showed up at our Box Office, asking if we had cheaper tickets than the ones she had found online. We asked her what she had found. “Just the $200 tickets on your website,” she said.

This couldn’t be true, of course: the tickets on our website range from $30 to $100. We helped her buy a $45 ticket in our Mezzanine, and chalked it up to a misunderstanding.

When a charming young couple came to the window the next day, asking about the same $230 tickets, alarm bells went off. Sure enough

These people—some of them long-time Playhouse devotees, some of them first-time vistors—had all stumbled across the same dishonest scheme: ticket agents are marking up our tickets by as much as 400%, even when performances are not sold out. These “resellers” aren’t typical scalpers; they don’t actually hold any ticket inventory, and they don’t have any relationship to our box office. Instead, they until they sell their $200 tickets on their own website, and then turn around and buy the tickets on ours.

“Ticket agents are marking up our tickets by as much as 400%, even when performances are not sold out.”

The main culprits are box-officetickets.com and ticketofficesales.com, two websites that appear to be operated by the same company.

 

Scalper Pricing

A scalper known as Secure-Tix operates both box-officetickets.com and ticketofficesales.com, and controls the top two ad placements on Google. San Francisco Playhouse’s official site is in the third position.

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