Everyone knows that in addition to cantankerous councils and local residents, the bane of a festival promoter’s existence is scalpers. Promoters and ticket retailers are constantly outlining their “comprehensive” action schemes for how they plan on dealing with the scourge of the events industry.
While we have to give props to anyone willing to take on the scalpers and their bothersome bots, we reckon they should all take a cue from Sacha Lord-Marchionne, the director of Manchester’s popular Parklife festival, who decided to take on a particularly boastful scalper all by himself.
According to Gigwise, an unnamed music fan in the UK was almost hit with a lifetime ban from the festival after he took to Facebook to boast about his intentions to sell Parklife tickets at triple their price. “I bought 12 tickets and I will be selling them at triple price on the day of Parklife. It’s all business,” he wrote.
After catching wind of the would-be businessman’s intentions, Lord-Marchionne took to Twitter with a screenshot of the man’s post and his own intentions to cancel all of the man’s tickets. “Ticket touts are the absolute bane of our lives,” Lord-Marchionne told the Manchester Evening News.
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“At sporting events it’s illegal but we’re not a sporting event so sadly it goes on,” the festival director continued. “And it really annoys us and it really annoys customers. I know for a fact at the last Parklife tickets were changing hands for £300. It’s just ripping people off.”
“So when I saw that I thought ‘I have to do something. We’ve cancelled the tickets and refunded them and we’ll put them back on sale.” But according to the alleged budding scalper, who reportedly claims on his Twitter feed to be an entrepreneur, he had no intention of ever scalping the tickets.
The man once again took to Facebook claiming that he was framed by his ex-girlfriend, who posted the comment maliciously as he was getting ready to leave for a holiday. “My ex-girlfriend put up all that stuff about my buying 12 tickets and selling them triple price. She is jealous cos we broke up and I’m flying out to Amsterdam tonight,” he wrote.
While we admit it’s unlikely that we’ll now witness a surge in festival promoters taking scalpers on one-by-one with threats of lifetime bans and who knows what else (we can think of a couple of things we’d like to see done to scalpers), Sacha Lord-Marchionne, you’re our hero.
