Manitoba ‘an island’ on ticket resale rules: True North VP

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/07/2022 (1477 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Rogers outage notwithstanding, online event ticketing platforms have made it such that there is no such thing as a sold-out event anymore.

Anyone can buy a ticket for any event anywhere in the world, even if it’s happening tomorrow. It just depends on how much you’re willing to pay.

While that’s just as true for concerts or NHL games in Winnipeg as it is anywhere else, the difference in Manitoba is that you will have to turn to the online grey market.

The online secondary marketplace for event tickets has evolved to eliminate the presence of sketchy scalpers lurking around the corner from the venue with tickets for sale.

Manitoba is the only place in North America that does not have such a safe environment and it is still technically illegal to sell event tickets above the list price in this province.

According to Kevin Donnelly, senior vice-president venues & entertainment at True North Sports & Entertainment, Winnipeg is the only one of the 32 NHL cities with such a law in place.

“Manitoba is an island in North America,” Donnelly said. “We’re not keeping pace with what is happening in the industry and what other regions have done to try to corral it in terms of the resale of tickets.”

Trevor Allin, the executive vice-president of Ticketmaster, said Manitoba is the only jurisdiction in all of Canada and the U.S. with such a law.

That Manitoba law was revised in 2018 eliminating the penalty, but the law has remained on the books.

What that means is that in Manitoba, Jets season ticket holders who, for whatever reason, want to sell tickets for some of the games and believe the demand is greater than the supply for that game, cannot post those tickets for sale on Ticketmaster at a price greater than the list price.

“Ticketmaster and True North partner to sell everything in the venues they operate and provide Manitobans with a safe ticketing service for all the events in their venues,” Allin said. “Other provinces and states allow for the safe buying and selling of tickets above face value. Manitoba does not.”

The fact that the punitive repercussions may be non-existent is beside the point for Ticketmaster.

“We just follow the law,” Allin said.

While Donnelly wants his customers to have the same freedom to sell high demand tickets as they do in other cities in North America, the situation in Manitoba also curtails True North’s ability to earn modest commission revenues on those secondary market sales as well access to the data on those people who are buying those tickets.

“Data is important, 100 per cent,” he said. “We want to be able to send you offers for other game. The data is critical.”

Meanwhile Ticketmaster and other online ticket platforms all have resale platforms built into their service offerings.

For instance for Friday night’s concert by The Weeknd in Toronto, the Ticketmaster site had resale tickets – at much higher than face value — clearly marked on their stadium seat map.

Ticketmaster will not flaunt the law against ticket reselling, even though it is an entirely legitimate aspect of its business throughout much of the rest of North America.

True North Sports & Entertainment, has an exclusive relationship with Hollywood-based Ticketmaster, which merged with Live Nation Entertainment in 2010.

It is a standard relationship that virtually all major league sports teams and concert venues have with a handful of online ticket platforms, of which Ticketmaster is the largest.

Tickets for Canada Life Centre and Burton Cummings Theatre events sold on Ticketmaster are easily verifiable at the door. While secondary market sales that take place on other platforms like SeatGeak or StubHub are often verifiable, many are not.

“It happens at every single event,” Donnelly said. “There is someone at the door with a ticket that is invalid that was bought from another platform.”

In addition to being the only jurisdiction in North America where it’s illegal to sell tickets above the list price, Manitoba also has no laws regulating the use of automated bots that can buy hundreds of tickets before you can type in your Ticketmaster password.

Ontario, B.C., Alberta and Quebec all have bans on bots.

Allin said, “There are sophisticated bad actors out there that use software bots that try to circumvent our system to scoop up tickets in order to sell them for higher prices in other marketplaces.”

The province also does not regulate the practice of speculative ticketing.

That’s when tickets are posted for sale –guaranteeing that seat or an equivalent or better one or your money back – even before the tickets are even on sale.

For instance, although tickets for Winnipeg Jets games for the 2022-23 season will not be available for sale until Aug. 22 the ticket platform, Seat Geek, sent out emails to some Jets customers this week offering tickets for several games. (The trick for speculative ticket sales is that they guarantee tickets of the equivalent or better value and do offer money back guarantees.)

Provincial officials would not respond to questions about why it insists on being an outlier.

A government spokesperson said, “Ticket resales are regulated under the Amusements Act. In Manitoba, it’s prohibited to resell a ticket for any amount greater than its face value. This provision is in place to protect consumers who participate in the ticket sales marketplace.”

Donnelly would not say much about the commission revenue that True North is forgoing because of the absence of the secondary ticket market, but he said the city’s application to Hockey Canada to host a World Junior championship a few years ago would have produced at least $100,000 less revenue than other bidders because of the absence of resale revenue.

“When you miss six figures of revenue, you don’t win,” Donnelly said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca