Oasis and Ticketmaster should refund fans who ended up paying hundreds of pounds more than the face value of tickets after so-called “dynamic pricing” was used to inflate prices, the consumer group Which? has said.
Which? called on the band and the ticketing company to “do the right thing” and refund the difference between the face value of the tickets and the heavily inflated price many ended up having to pay.
Some fans paid more than £350 for tickets with a face value of less than £150, and had to make a split-second decision whether to complete their purchase, as dynamic pricing caused prices to soar during the booking process.
Lisa Webb, a consumer law expert at Which?, said: “It seems extremely unfair that Oasis fans got up early and battled through queues only to find that ticket prices had more than doubled from the originally advertised price.
“Oasis and Ticketmaster should do the right thing and refund fans who may have been misled into paying over the odds for tickets that would have been half the price just hours earlier.”
Webb added: “Which? believes that Ticketmaster’s ‘in-demand’ pricing practices for Oasis tickets could have breached consumer law as it appears fans weren’t properly warned about its use until far too late in the purchase journey, leading to a nasty shock at the checkout.”
Under the consumer protection from unfair trading regulations, traders must not mislead on how prices are presented or leave out key pricing information.
Last week, Oasis blamed promoters, Ticketmaster and the band’s management team, saying it had “at no time had any awareness” of the selling strategy, which is now the subject of separate investigations by the UK competition watchdog and its European counterpart.
A spokesperson for Ticketmaster said: “We are committed to cooperating with the Competition and Markets Authority and look forward to sharing more facts about the ticket sale with them.”
Press relations for the band did not respond to a request for comment.
Liam and Noel Gallagher’s reunion tour, which was announced 15 years after the band’s acrimonious split, is expected to generate revenues of £400m, according to some estimates.
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Last week, Oasis announced two more dates at Wembley stadium, taking the tour total to 19 so far. A “special, staggered, invitation-only” ballot for tickets for the extra Wembley gigs will not use dynamic pricing.
The date of the ballot has not been announced but it is designed to enable verified fans who did not get a ticket in Ticketmaster’s original pre-order ballot to try again.
All those eligible to buy tickets – with up to 180,000 available over two nights at the UK’s biggest venue – were contacted over the past weekend.
Pricing has not been released, but before the original pre-sale ballot promoters said standing tickets would cost about £150, while standard seated tickets would range from £73 to about £205.