Why the Oasis ticket debacle shows that dynamic pricing needs to be stopped

When I logged onto my Ticketmaster account at just before 9am on Saturday to buy Oasis tickets, I certainly didn’t expect to have to wait until nearly 3pm to reach the front of the queue. But then there were I suppose 96,000 ahead of me.

Still when I did eventually get to the front of the queue I had assumed, naively perhaps, that the prices of the tickets on offer would be the same as the prices advertised before having to spend half a day of my life staring at my phone as I moved slowly up the digital queue.

So imagine my surprise when my chance came at last that an ordinary ticket was now over £400, several times higher than the advertised price. It’s rather like getting to the front of a supermarket queue only to find that the juicy oranges you have in your basket are now £5 each rather than the 50p it said they were on the shelf!

But then this is dynamic pricing for you. I guess it’s all about algorithms that adjust the price based on demand and supply, the same dynamic pricing that you have when you order an Uber on a train strike day (only they call that surge pricing) or you try to book a flight during the school holiday. 

Some might say (see what I did there) that this is the ultimate in capitalism. But surely it can’t be right, especially if you don’t know when you start queueing that the price will be many more times the price that tickets for the gig were advertised for. Surely at the very least there should be a maximum price cap (say twice the advertised ticket price), though ideally the practice should be outlawed altogether. I’m pleased the government is finally looking at solutions so that fans aren’t completely ripped off by dynamic pricing. 

As Which’s Rocio Concha, Which? Director of Policy and Advocacy, says: 

“It’s right that the government is widening its ticketing consultation to include dynamic pricing. This is an issue that really matters to consumers and the Oasis controversy is just one of a number of examples that demonstrate pricing rules are struggling to keep up with the latest technology-driven tactics used by businesses.

“It seems unfair that Oasis fans got up early and battled through the queues only to find that ticket prices had increased dramatically – especially when the high level of demand for the concerts was clear from the outset.

“The Competition and Markets Authority should urgently clarify whether this kind of dynamic pricing approach for concert tickets is legal under current rules. In the meantime, it’s essential that companies are transparent about how they will use dynamic pricing, so that consumers don’t get a nasty shock at checkout.”