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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

This is already a solved problem- look at how airline seats are handled.

>This is already a solved problem- look at how airline seats are handled.

you want to solve the problem of airline tickets, let people resell their tickets to other travellers.

Can you expand on this? It seems to me that a major difference between flight tickets and concert tickets is that when an airline overbooks they can switch you to a later flight. However, most concerts only perform once in a given city.

What is overbooking and why does it happen? From what I can tell, overbooking is entirely preventable and done to maximize profit. Just don't do that?

Hotels operate in a similar fashion as well.

Could sell two classes of tickets, one that is garunteed and one that might be overbooked. If you show up and find out you're overbooked you get a credit for another show (maybe even at some multiplier?). Basic Supply/Demand suggests that reducing the price means more demand, ie: more people going to go see shows, but would need to see it in practice to know for sure.

I think they are referring to the ability to resell your ticket.

In the airline model, your ticket is tied to your identity. If you don't want to use it, you get a refund instead of selling it.

You can also choose a ticketing agent instead of being forced to use just a single outlet.

In the concert model, you (or a complex entity) buys as many tickets as you can get your hands on from the only seller, and if you don't plan on using the tickets sell them for multiples of what you paid via a shady network of reselling.

No. I'm referring to the fact that I can book the same airline seat through dozens of companies because of the airline GDS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

Why not this but for concert seats?

The venue is necessarily a centralizing agent, whereas airlines necessarily have to use decentralized agents (or did when GDS was invented). The decentralizing of event tickets is artificial.

There isn't a lot of obvious utility in allowing anyone in the world to buy a concert ticket (unless you want speculative resellers in your ecosystem). For people travelling to an event, that's what the will-call window is for, and it requires a matching ID. Whereas airlines cannot reasonably maintain a network capable of selling a ticket to anyone worldwide despite their being a very good set of reasons for that to happen.

This probably also explains why airlines allow independent agents, but no reselling. The original market (pre-internet) required it, but the airlines didn't really want to sacrifice their margin to speculative resellers (scalpers).

Concerts used to be sold in a centralized way (you could buy tickets to a specific show at one of a few authorized venues, in person). This worked fine before the internet, since it meant that fans stood on equal footing with speculative resellers. If I want to scalp tickets, I have to go stand in the rain with the fans, and I can't buy 50 tickets since the sellers won't sell more than a few at a time.

Contextualized with how the different industries were created, we can see why GDS made sense at one point, but doesn't really anymore, and why it would never make sense for event ticketing.

I want to make a Jefferson Airplane joke here but I don't know how.

Yeah, let's just put TSA checkpoints at the entrance of every concert venue. Problem solved!

Honestly, I'd rather have TSA than the normal security. At least then you can bring bags in.

There's like 50+ lines at an event, if TSA had 50+ lines then the airport would be so much faster.

No, I'm not talking about the TSA. I'm talking about how you can buy airline tickets through a number of different entities because they've cooperated on a system.

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