National Ticket Broker Association Enters Golden Knights’ Ticket Resale Debate
By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
The national trade group representing ticket brokers has issued strong comments regarding the Vegas Golden Knights’ right to cancel season ticket accounts if season ticket holders resell their tickets through unauthorized third parties to violate their ticket contract deals.
The National Association of Ticket Brokers issued a statement to LVSportsBiz.com after reading our story this week on the VGK cancelling season ticket accounts of fans who do not use official team partner StubHub for ticket resale. Gary Adler, the association’s executive director and counsel, asserted the Golden Knights are using “hidden channels” to sell some tickets “in the secondary resale market.” Here is the statement’s complete paragraph to provide context to that charge.
“Keep in mind that the tickets being cancelled are already purchased from the team, meaning the full price plus taxes and fees are paid. And while the Golden Knights are quick to imply that revoked tickets will be offered to the next local fan who promises not to resell them or fill their seats with a visiting team fan, our sources tell us that is not the truth. Instead many of these tickets the team is reselling at a higher price than what the original season ticketholder paid, and the team is also doing this through hidden channels so you won’t necessarily see those tickets offered by the box office. If the team is making an argument for transparency, it should open its records and show the public what, exactly, is happening with these revoked tickets. It would be a real eye opener into how some teams, including the Golden Knights, are actively engaged in the secondary resale market.”
Those are assertive words lodged against the Golden Knights, which have 14,000 full season ticket holder plans and are in the enviable position of selling the hottest and most coveted ticket in the National Hockey League after the first-year team made an unexpected miracle run to the Stanley Cup Finals three months ago.
Keep in mind the Golden Knights are hardly alone in professional sports in dropping season ticket accounts if they believe season ticket holders violated terms of their ticket contract for actions such as reselling their tickets through non-verified third parties. The Knights advise fans to not sell their tickets through unauthorized sites such as Craig’s List, Vivid Seats or Facebook.
VGK President Kerry Bubolz and VP for Ticketing and Suites Todd Pollock declined to comment for this story.
But generally speaking, professional teams such as the Golden Knights typically do not want to devote ticket staff hours to policing their season ticket holders. They will, however, step in and enforce ticket contracts with fans when season ticket holders become garage brokers and try to resell their tickets to garner big profits.
Teams are in the business of selling tickets, so cancelling accounts takes time away from staff members, who are then forced to spend more time working with fans on ticket wait lists to figure out seat locations and ticket packages. Teams argue they have created the value in the sports ticket they sell and do not want fans becoming another business layer parlaying that ticket into big profits.
Some teams even ban fans from using any brokers at all. The Nashville Predators, for example, don’t allow their season ticket holders to use ticket brokers and have the right to revoke their season tickets if they sell more than 50 percent of the home games.
The issue of reselling Golden Knights tickets is a hot-button subject that divides many fans.
Some believe the Golden Knights have the right to cancel ticket deals of season ticket holders who violate the terms of their ticket “membership” contracts.
Meanwhile, others believe fans who buy a ticket should have the right to do anything they want with the ticket.
Fans are split about ticket resale policies. Photo credit: Daniel Clark/LVSportsBiz.com
Two Golden Knights fans who contacted LVSportsBiz.com after their accounts were nixed included St. George, Utah woman Cheryl Rosso-Streitz, who said she attended 3o of 41 regular season games (so she sold her tickets for most of those missed games) and made it to all the playoff games last season. She acknowledged trying to sell her two lower bowl seats for $1,500 each on Facebook for the Stanley Cup Finals Game 5 after she bought the tickets under the team’s “Knights Vow” playoff deal that called for fans to promise to not sell their tickets. She said she didn’t realize she couldn’t sell the two tickets on Facebook.
The debate over ticket resales has entered the political arena and has reached Carson City, where lobbyists and Nevada legislators fashioned legislation on the topic at the last session in 2017.
Lobbyists for both teams/sports organizations/event organizers and the ticket brokers hashed out the proposed legislation. In fact, at that last session, original legislation included a criminality element to it before a compromise bill that both sides could agree on became law. (The approved legislation did not include any criminality.) Ticket resales are expected to be brought up again when the state Legislature begins the 80th session Feb. 4, 2019.
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The Golden Knights do have a legal wrinkle with their own secondary ticket market partner, StubHub. While the team advises fans to use StubHub if they need to resell their tickets, the Golden Knights sued StubHub in June, when VGK alleged in a lawsuit that StubHub withheld more than $1 million in playoff ticket revenues. You might recall the Golden Knights had a two-tier ticket price point system for the postseason called the Knights Vow.
StubHub declined to comment Thursday on the national ticket broker’s assertion that the Golden Knights were using “hidden channels” to sell tickets on the secondary market.
Adler said the Golden Knights’ current season ticket policy will drive secondary market activity on VGK ticket sales underground.
“By cancelling accounts solely based on resale activity, the Golden Knights will drive the unstoppable and inevitable secondary market underground, which is where consumers get scammed and there are no protections. We’ve seen this movie before, and this is what happens. Every time,” Adler wrote in the association statement.
But major league teams counter that fans reselling tickets through unauthorized third parties leads to the production of counterfeit tickets. Indeed, the Golden Knights had to deal with upset fans during the playoffs when they had purchased phony “tickets” through unauthorized third parties. Here are examples of the counterfeit playoff tickets.
Adler acknowledged the Golden Knights are not alone with having a ticket cancellation policy.
“We have seen revocation of season ticket packages elsewhere, and policies like these only embolden teams to set restrictive and costly terms and conditions of ticket resale. This results in less choice for people looking to buy or sell a ticket, and unnecessarily higher prices for the fans. Worst of all, it drives the resale market that will exist no matter what restrictive schemed are employed, into the risky, scam-artist prone days of the past,” Adler said. “A tremendous amount of progress has been achieved over the last 25 years to make ticket resale better for consumers, and team policies like this one only set that progress back.”
With the Golden Knights’ popularity soaring and fans rejoicing at team events such as Wednesday’s fan fest in downtown Las Vegas, the market’s first major league team is in the position to define the season ticket deal conditions.
But the Carolina Hurricanes offer a cautionary tale for the Golden Knights to consider. Carolina, another non-traditional hockey, sunbelt market, won a Stanley Cup in 2006 but saw its season ticket total drop to 6,000 by 2014 amid a playoff drought. LVSportsBiz.com published a story on the Carolina situation earlier this year.
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