The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI) is assessing whether ticket resale website Viagogo has breached advertising rules in the way it promotes itself on Google.
One of the issues being assessed is Viagogo’s use of the word “official” in its Google ads. Viagogo is not the official ticket retailer for the vast majority of big events in Ireland. The word “official” in the ad refers only to the fact that it is a link to the official Viagogo website.
Buying Google ads allows Viagogo to appear at the top of search engine results. For more than a week, Viagogo has been at the top of Google results for fans searching for tickets for Ed Sheeran’s shows in Ireland next year, despite Aiken Promotions, the event organiser, warning that resale tickets are invalid.
The ASAI was unable to comment on whether its investigation, which is on foot of a complaint, relates to the advertising of invalid tickets, such as the Sheeran concerts. Google is understood to have decided that Viagogo’s ads for the Sheeran shows are not fraudulent or misrepresentative, despite the fact that the tickets it is selling may be unusable. Google is also said to be satisfied with Viagogo’s use of the word “official”.
The name of the original buyer is printed on the Sheeran tickets, and they will have to bring their credit card and identification to gain entry to the concert. The measures are intended to crack down on touting. However, 368 tickets for Sheeran’s first seven Irish dates were on sale on Viagogo this weekend priced at €132-€1,500, excluding booking fees of a further 33%. At face value the tickets were €81-€91. Tickets for a further two dates went on sale on Saturday.
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The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has received a number of queries from consumers in relation to the price and validity of Ed Sheeran tickets on Viagogo. However, the watchdog cannot enforce consumer protection legislation against the firm because it is registered in Switzerland.
Frank Guinevan, from Templeogue in Dublin, was horrified to discover on the morning that tickets for the first Sheeran shows went on sale that his 16-year-old son had used his parents’ debit card to buy four tickets on Viagogo for €1,200. It was only at the last minute the full price of the transaction — the price for four tickets including booking fees, rather than for one ticket without booking fees — became apparent. The family had not yet heard about Sheeran’s anti-tout rules.
Guinevan said: “We left him [our son] in control of this, selecting the site and queuing and waiting. He got on to the first website that came up, Viagogo. He didn’t realise it was a separate site altogether to Ticketmaster, the official site.”
Viagogo has refused Guinevan a refund and has instead encouraged him to relist the tickets on the website for sale to someone else. Guinevan has asked Bank of Ireland to reverse the transaction but it is not clear yet whether this will be possible. He said: “I’m not a ticket tout. I don’t want to enter into ripping off someone else — the tickets can’t be used.
“Seventy per cent of me says we will never see the money again. We are a working family and €1,200 is hard-won. It’s so important to me to try to emphasise to other people not to do the same.”
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In one email, a member of Viagogo’s customer service team told Guinevan that the tickets were “perfectly fine and valid to use”. However, Mary Kelly, head of ticketing and marketing at Aiken, confirmed that fans who bought tickets on Viagogo would be refused entry.
She defended the level of publicity on the ticketing rules and denied that Aiken could have done more to warn fans against buying resale tickets on websites such as Viagogo. The rules were flagged in ads for the gig, in press releases and on the Ticketmaster website, she said.
Viagogo did not respond to requests for comment. Google said: “We have a set of strict policies which govern what ads we do and do not allow. We do not allow fraudulent or misrepresentative ads, and when we discover ads that break our policies, we quickly take action.”