Cavalia, that touring horse-centric play/circus/show/thing, hasn’t even opened in the Twin Cities yet, and its producers are wrangling with a host of ticket resale sites that are trumping their official site in search results (“Cavalia is currently talking to Google about search engine optimization”) and, they say, “inflating our prices” by as much as double or more.
They’ve taken the step of issuing a press release fingering resale sites they deem “illegitimate,” namely:
www. shop.ticketluck.com
www. stubhub.com
www. ticketnest.com
www. excite.com
www. gotickets.com
www. cavaliaminneapolis.com
Not included on the blacklist is Ticket King, whose director of operations wrote a fiery response to my recent post supporting artists’ and venues’ right to issue paperless tickets. You can, however, buy Cavalia tickets on Ticket King. As of this posting, a ticket in the cheap (er, “cheap”) seats would go for $64.50 on Cavalia‘s site; those seats are each $148.00 on Ticket King. A “horse lover” (hmm) can buy a ticket for $149.50 from Cavalia, $330.00 from Ticket King.
“According to leading free market economists,” writes the Ticket King representative, “the secondary ticket market is one of the truest displays of free market economics in the nation.”
With the respect to this situation, the free market economist I’d be most inclined to trust is P.T. Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Photo by Frederic Chehu, courtesy Cavalia
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