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0 pointsdghlsakjg1y ago0 comments

I think they are referring to the ability to resell your ticket.

In the airline model, your ticket is tied to your identity. If you don't want to use it, you get a refund instead of selling it.

You can also choose a ticketing agent instead of being forced to use just a single outlet.

In the concert model, you (or a complex entity) buys as many tickets as you can get your hands on from the only seller, and if you don't plan on using the tickets sell them for multiples of what you paid via a shady network of reselling.

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2OEH8eoCRo01y ago

No. I'm referring to the fact that I can book the same airline seat through dozens of companies because of the airline GDS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

Why not this but for concert seats?

dghlsakjgOP1y ago

The venue is necessarily a centralizing agent, whereas airlines necessarily have to use decentralized agents (or did when GDS was invented). The decentralizing of event tickets is artificial.

There isn't a lot of obvious utility in allowing anyone in the world to buy a concert ticket (unless you want speculative resellers in your ecosystem). For people travelling to an event, that's what the will-call window is for, and it requires a matching ID. Whereas airlines cannot reasonably maintain a network capable of selling a ticket to anyone worldwide despite their being a very good set of reasons for that to happen.

This probably also explains why airlines allow independent agents, but no reselling. The original market (pre-internet) required it, but the airlines didn't really want to sacrifice their margin to speculative resellers (scalpers).

Concerts used to be sold in a centralized way (you could buy tickets to a specific show at one of a few authorized venues, in person). This worked fine before the internet, since it meant that fans stood on equal footing with speculative resellers. If I want to scalp tickets, I have to go stand in the rain with the fans, and I can't buy 50 tickets since the sellers won't sell more than a few at a time.

Contextualized with how the different industries were created, we can see why GDS made sense at one point, but doesn't really anymore, and why it would never make sense for event ticketing.

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