You can change a name on a flight. There’s a fee perhaps. I don’t know where you are but in most European countries train tickets are valid to the bearer. Dinner reservations, I’ve never once been asked for ID. And indeed I’ve often had reservations made by others for me, or arranged reservations for friends and colleagues from out of town - “I know a great restaurant you’ll like, I’ll reserve a table, just give them my name”.

Hotel bookings - again, the number of times I’ve booked a bunch of rooms for work under my name and then we just assign them at check-in, and the number of times I’ve travelled for work where the hotel room is reserved in someone else’s name.

So yeah, pretty sure this is commonplace that the person who shows up with the chit and can verify certain info gets the access.

And of course, there nothing at all to stop concert tickets being sold to verified buyers and then transferred to other verified buyers.

But during this court hearing it transpired - from emails sent by Michael Rapino - that Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s “Verified Fan” scheme is just a scam to make artist feel like ticketing isn’t the murky Wild West that Ticketmaster knows it is. “Verified Fan” meant almost nothing.

You can do this with train tickets, dinner reservations and hotel bookings though? Only thing you can’t do that with is for flights and that’s due to security checks/passport etc

Most concert tickets are not standing and you used to get paper tickets you could just hand to someone else, why should you not be allowed to do this just because it moved to digital?

Airline tickets and train tickets are because they want to identify the person, for tracking/supposed national security purposes. Also, you typically can transfer train tickets. Depends on the country.

Dinner reservations: I’ve literally never had an issue “transferring” a reservation. There’s no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, I’ve never once had anyone question that.

Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons, so transferring them should not be a problem.

Dinner reservations is a weird one. I have never heard of this concept where they would id you while you are being seated. Maybe there are super exclusive restaurants I'm oblivious to? But even so, roughly 100% of dinner reservations can be implicitly transferred.

I like the combined suggestions of three other commenters:

1) Allow transfers during a very short window (e.g. 24h before the event)

2) Allow full refunds up to x days before the event

3) Release a small batch of tickets 24h before the event, as a way of reducing the chance for scalpers to make money, and giving real fans a last chance without paying exorbitant prices

All three together offer a reasonable tradeoff. The tickets will go (mostly) to real fans, yet still giving you flexibility in case your plans change (work, sick, etc). And if you know well in advance, you can get a full refund, without having to worry with reselling, paying commission, etc.

Also prohibit secondary markets entirely. Similar to airlines, there's no reselling of tickets.

Of course, this is just wishful thinking. Too many intermediaries benefit from screwing showgoers, so this will never be implemented.

Pretty sure with air travel it's just a security issue, and all the other ones you can totally do.

I think they do kinda work that way. When you buy an airline ticket through some third-party website, the price is lower than the main site, yet they're making a profit. They must be hoarding then reselling tickets with the airline's permission, right? Same with cruises.

The thing is, you as an individual can't transfer tickets because of what the other person said.

Because they're not airline tickets nor hotel bookings. Crazy though that nowadays train tickets have started implementing this ID thing (I'll take your word for it, last time I purchased a train ticket, as a tourist, I had to input no name on it, it was either in Italy or Switzerland, I forgot), the same goes for dinner reservations. Enshittification is indeed accelerating.

For many events, the demographics lean toward age groups where people have jobs with work schedules that aren't known more than a few weeks in advance. The initially planned friend group (e.g., four people) can have little overlap with who is actually free on the event date and actually attends. Also, if the event has assigned seating, people buying their own tickets typically has the adverse outcome that you can't sit together.

We don’t have to use one broken market (airline seats) as a model for another broken market (concerts).

Anyway back to the top post - a Dutch auction foods almost all these issues without weird rules.

I tend to buy 2-4 tickets for a show way in advance of me knowing which of my friends would go with me