Distraught Oasis fans have revealed family rows are breaking out over the sky-high prices being paid for tickets to see the band’s reunion concerts.
One woman told how she was left shocked by her husband splashing out £350 on tickets she thought would cost £85 – while others have told of already regretting their four-figure spending amid controversy over ‘dynamic pricing’.
Hundreds of people have now officially complained about how tickets were advertised after charges for the comeback tour soared when going on sale on Saturday.
And experts suggested thousands of people were ‘misled’ as the Ticketmaster system pushed up the prices due to the huge demand, while consumers told how they would be paying off the costs for as long as a year.
Buyers were left shocked by standard tickets more than doubling from £148 to £355, after brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher last week announced their reunion 15 years on from the Britpop band’s split.
Do YOU regret shelling out on Oasis tickets? Email aidan.radnedge.mol@mailonline.co.uk
Brothers Noel (left) and Liam Gallagher (right) announced on Tuesday last week that they were reuniting their band Oasis for a series of concerts next summer
The group have not performed on stage together since their split in 2009
Fans and politicians have criticised the ticketing system for the reunion tour shows, with many prices soaring when online sales opened last Saturday
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has since pledged to look into the use of surge pricing in a forthcoming Government review of the secondary gig sales market.
Many fans also missed out on the reunion tour tickets as they battled with website issues, and being mislabelled as bots, before Oasis announced all 17 shows in the UK and Dublin had sold out.
Social media users have been sharing their dismay after committing to tickets despite prices surging far higher than originally expected.
And Louise Mills told MailOnline about her horror on discovering just how much her husband had spent on tickets for the concert at Wembley Stadium next July 26.
She said: ‘I regret my husband spending that much per ticket – it’s just ridiculous and disgusting that this is what happens if you’re a fan.
‘The ticket price is £350 each for four tickets, which is the cost of a small holiday!
‘Unfortunately as he is such a fan, he bought them, but I was under the guise that they would be £85 so I was shocked when after waiting on 4 different computers to get through the queue, he paid what he did.
‘I hope that the government can try to sort the ticketing system, as you sign into the queue for one price £155 and it changed to “in demand” standing which was £355.’
Another Oasis devotee, Rebecca Smith, told MailOnline: ‘I absolutely regret buying four standing tickets at £1,400 to include the insurance in case they split up.
‘But after six hours of being in a queue, I got caught up in the whole drama.’
Noel Gallagher (left) and brother Liam (right) appear to have ended their 15-year feud by agreeing to the reunion taking in live concerts across the UK and ireland including Wembley
The brothers announced last Tuesday they were reuniting for a series of gigs next year, after the Britpop band split 15 years ago
Fans found themselves in queues of up to 11 hours when tickets went on sale on Saturday
The ticketing approach was condemned yesterday by the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, who told how one of their members queued for five hours before being charged £348 for a Wembley standing ticket when expecting to pay £151.
Sylvia Rook, the institute’s lead officer for fair trading, said: ‘Whilst dynamic pricing is an accepted practice for holidays, flights and taxis, the difference here is that consumers are informed of the price before they decide to make a purchase.
In this case, the public were given a price for tickets, and were not informed until they finally got to the front of the queue, that the price had increased.
‘This undoubtedly meant that many consumers have overreached and ended up spending much more than they originally intended. Many other consumers ended up disappointed after deciding not to proceed to pay the vastly increased prices.
‘It is a breach of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 if a trader misleads consumers regarding the price of goods and services, if that causes the average consumer to take a different “transactional decision”.
‘In this case many consumers would not have joined the queue had they known that the price would have increased by the time they were able to purchase, and many fans could not afford the increased price.’
Following the ticket row, the Advertising Standards Authority has received 450 complaints about Ticketmaster adverts for the Oasis gigs.
A spokesperson for the UK’s regulator of advertising said the complainants argue that the adverts made ‘misleading claims about availability and pricing’.
Ticketmaster said it does not set prices and its website says this is down to the ‘event organiser’ who ‘has priced these tickets according to their market value’.
House of Commons leader and Lord President of the Council Lucy Powell was among those hit by dynamic pricing on Saturday, and eventually forked out more than double the original quoted cost of a ticket for an Oasis show.
Noel (left) and Liam Gallagher (right), pictured here at a Teenage Cancer Trust charity concert at London’s Albert Hall in March 2003, have faced flak over their reunion tour ticket prices
The official Oasis account on X, formerly Twitter, announced on Saturday evening that all the reunion concerts had now sold out
Liam and Noel Gallagher, pictured here at the V Festival in Chelmsford in Essex in August 2005, have not played together after Oasis broke up in 2009
Ms Powell said she ended up buying two tickets for £350 each for Heaton Park in July, which were originally quoted at £148.50, not including a booking fee of £2.75.
The Manchester Central MP told BBC Radio 5 Live that she does not ‘particularly like’ surge pricing, before adding: ‘It is the market and how it operates.
‘You’ve absolutely got to be transparent about that so that when people arrive after hours of waiting, they understand that the ticket is going to cost more.’
And now Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to ensure concert tickets are ‘at a price people can afford’ amid the Oasis row.
The Prime Minister said there were ‘a number of things we can do’ to and we should do’ to fix the issue which he said is ‘not just an Oasis problem’, the Sun reported.
He said: ‘This is a problem for tickets for all sorts of events where people go online straight away as soon as they can and within seconds sometimes, if sometimes minutes, all the tickets are gone and the prices start going through the roof, which means many people can’t afford it.
‘On that, I do think there are a number of things that we can do and we should do because otherwise you get to the situation where families simply can’t go or are absolutely spending a fortune on tickets, whatever it may be.
‘So we’ll grip this and make sure that actually, tickets are available at a price that people can actually afford.’
There have also been concerns raised about the non-official sellers Viagogo, who are listing resale tickets for thousands of pounds.
The secondary seller has defended the practice saying fans sell the tickets, saying: ‘Resale is legal in the UK and fans are always protected by our guarantee that they will receive their tickets in time for the event or their money back.’
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy (pictured today) has promised that concerns over ‘dynamic pricing’ brought to the fore by the Oasis reunion shows will be part of a government review
In a round of interviews, Lucy Powell revealed she managed to bag two tickets for the hotly-anticipated reunion tour
Group portrait of British rock band Oasis at Nomad Studios in Manchester in 1993
Now Matt Drew, who oversees business development at Viagogo, has called Britain’s ticketing system ‘broken’ as he described how Saturday’s Oasis sale ‘descended into chaos’.
He told Sky News: ‘It’s a system that isn’t fit for purpose. It’s clearly broken, and bands and consumers are the ones that are losing out.
‘These exclusive points of sales are almost unique to this industry, and it’s clear that they don’t work – they cause crashes, they cause the ability for people to squeeze on price to eye-watering levels.’
Oasis have told followers that Ticketmaster and Twickets should only be used for resales, and put up for prices at ‘face value’, otherwise they will be ‘cancelled by the promoters’.
Brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher confirmed their reunion last Tuesday following the end of their more than a decade long acrimonious split.
Oasis fans splashing out hundreds of pounds each to see the band’s reunion tour will boost Britain’s economy by £487million, it has been suggested.
The Centre for Economic Business Research (CEBR) think tank predicts each fan will spend £406 in going to see the eagerly-anticipated sell out comeback tour.
The CEBR forecast of the half-a-billion boost estimates how much those attending gigs will fork out on hotels, travel, merchandise, and drinks, reported The Times.
According to their analysis, Oasis fans will spend £175million on tickets, £71million on getting to the concerts and £73million on hotels.
That figure is still dwarfed by the Taylor Swift mania that swept across the country during her UK leg of her Eras Tour, with calculations estimating each fan spent £848 to boost the economy by almost £1billion.
Meanwhile, an old tweet from Liam criticising his brother for selling tickets for $350 (£266) for a gig in the US back in 2017 has been widely shared online.
Taylor Swift on stage at Wembley Stadium in London on June 21 during her Eras Tour
Fans walk towards Wembley Stadium on June 21 ahead of Taylor Swift’s first London concert
The younger sibling posted on X, then called Twitter: ‘350 dollars to go and see rkid in USA what a c*** when will it all stop as you were LG x.’
One person wrote in response to the resurfaced post: ‘This hasn’t aged well…’
Another said: ‘£380 for a ‘reactively priced’ GA when people had spent 3 hours queuing. What sort of c*** would do that?’
A different poster commented, ‘Well this is evergreen’, while another added: ‘Not ageing well, Liam.’