Rip off Prince tickets: buyer beware!
Calvin posted this on Jun 3rd 2008 under Digital Marketing, Events, Internet, Rant
My wife is mad about Prince – and she’s been so supportive and understanding while I’ve been immersed in this Digital Marketing book project, that on the spur of the moment I decided to see if I could snag a couple of tickets for his upcoming concert in Croke Park.
Off I went to Google.ie to search for Prince Ireland. The first entry in the results page that was for Prince concert tickets was this one, from a crowd in the Netherlands called worldticketshop.com. All of the right bells and whistles were there… verified by Verisign, SSL secure server, etc. – but the cheapest tickets on offer were for €265, which seemed a bit on the steep side.
This was going to be more expensive than I’d anticipated… or was it?
I went to Ticketmaster.ie, which of course is where I should have gone in the first place, and bought two tickets for €66.50 each (and before I’m labelled a cheapskate let me just say that I looked for the the €89 category, but it had sold out, and the higher priced tickets seemed a bit on the extravagant side – so we’ll be a little way from the action, but hey, we’re there for the music, right?). Total cost for two tickets including Ticketmaster’s do f**k all fee handling fee (who are they trying to kid on an automated website with e-mail ticket delivery?) €145.70. Or about €120 cheaper than one ticket from Worldticketshop.com. Sorted.
What this really illustrates is that you need to be careful what you search for on Google, and shop around before you buy. Searching for Prince Ireland returned a few results for books from Amazon.com, followed by the rip-off worldticketshop.com site. Had I searched for Prince Tickets instead, two of the first three organic results returned would have been for Ticketmaster.ie.
So buyer beware – and remember that Google’s results are only as good as the queries you throw at it.
