October 10, 2008, Newsletter Issue #138: Buying Sold-Out Tickets

Tip of the Week

If your goal is to buy sold-out tickets to the hottest event in town, there are online ticket brokers and secondary marketplaces that promise to deliver. But you will pay dearly for it.

For example, the popular online marketplace Stubhub.com (recently bought by eBay) tacks on a 25 percent surcharge -- 15 percent to sellers and 10 percent to buyers -- to make a profit.

Ticket brokers will charge you anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars for the hottest seats in the country. So if you want sold-out tickets to the Super Bowl, World Series, The Lion King or The Final Four, be prepared to dip into your bank account considerably.

Here are some examples:

Tickco.com sells tickets to the Final Four for between $200 and $5000, depending on where you want to sit. At Ticketsnow.com you will pay more than $300 for seats at The Lion King on Broadway. Tickets normally cost between $50 and $112.Tickets located on the 50 yard line to see the New England Patriots play the Indianapolis Colts in the playoffs recently went for between $625 and $910 at Boston ticket broker agencies, according to The Boston Globe. The face value of those seats? Just $125. All three agencies who sold those playoff seats to the Patriots games told The Boston Globe they charged so much because they have to pay a steep premium to get the tickets they resell and would be forced out of business or out of state if they couldn't pass their acquisition costs along to customers.

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