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Comment by KumaBear | Hacker News Reader

Solution that might be anti user friendly. Tickets are bought and assigned to a persons name at time of purchase. They can only be refunded at cost and resold at cost to buyers. Release of tickets refunded shall be reposted for resell at a random time after attempting a refund.

This will however allow people to pay for bots that will purchase tickets on their behalf. But I believe a verification system can prevent that from happening if one would like. But the incentives aren’t there to do so.

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The problem for seated events is variations on, four people buy tickets together, seats ABCD, and the people in seats B and D drop out. They have friends who would buy the empty seats, but instead end up with a stranger in between them.

Or two people buy seats together, one can’t make it, and now the other person is stuck sitting with a stranger. And they have a friend who also wants to go who is also sitting alone.

The venue might still sell out but it’s a worse experience for everyone. Even groups who all get in together get annoyed by people trying to swap seats or cram in the aisles to be with their friends. Venue staff are stuck dealing with crowd control issues.

> but instead end up with a stranger in between them

Offer the stranger $20 to swap seats.

You can swap whose name is assigned on tickets you own. But you cannot change the names of anyone. It’s the only way to prevent scalping. It’s not costumer friendly but it’s also anti-scalper

yeah but also what percentage of fans get burnt by the inflexibility once and then get permanently soured on the band and venue, because now every time they think about them there's a terrible experience to remember

I always figured a lottery would work best.

Accept reservations (maybe with a token deposit or a card authorization to discourage making too many claims) for a week. Then at the end, draw winners for each block of seats; if they don't claim them in 48 hours, draw from remaining reservations. Repeat a fixed number of times and then scrum-sale anything that didn't go through.

There's no more risk of "the website crashed for everyone but scalpers" if you have a full week to place your request.

I’ve heard of this before, it might be Joe Rogan that does this

It's one of the most common ways to sell tickets for any kind of event. It's tried and tested for a long time.

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