Ken Neufeld: Unscripted June 16, 2010
Buyer beware!
We are moving into our second week of The Phantom of the Opera and we are starting to see ticketing problems with people buying on the “secondary” market. In other words, the scalpers are drawing in unsuspecting theatre goers to websites offering tickets to our productions.
What’s wrong with that? Well, it’s expensive first of all. When you buy through the secondary market, you will probably pay a lot more for the ticket and certainly more in service charges than if you had bought the ticket through Ticket Center Stage – our box office operation located at the Schuster Center. And I’m not talking about a dollar or two more – some $50 tickets are being sold on the Internet for $150 plus service charges! Other than paying too much money, you might also be buying a seat that doesn’t exist for a performance that isn’t scheduled. We recently looked at some secondary sites and they were selling seats for a performance on June 8 for Phantom – there was no June 8 performance scheduled, the run didn’t start until June 9. And if you come to the box office with these tickets, you’ll be out of luck for any kind of refund and you’ll likely miss the performance.
How do you ensure that you are buying real seats for the real price? Always buy through Ticket Center Stage. We are the only outlet authorized to sell tickets at our venues (other than in some extraordinary circumstances). If you see our productions advertised in the newspaper or on television, phone the number shown or go to the web address shown – that will lead you to us. Be very leery of buying on any kind of alternate web site. If in doubt, call us or come down to the box office at the Schuster if possible. We’ll make sure you buy the real thing.
Ticket Center Stage:
(937) 228-3630 or (888) 228-3630
http://www.ticketcenterstage.com/
Located in the Wintergarden of the Benjamin & Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center.
-Ken
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 8:09 am and is filed under Unscripted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Ticket Center Stage is the only outlet authorized to sell tickets for events at the Schuster Center and Victoria Theatre.