Arts Facilities

Ticket Reseller War Stories

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About three years ago I wrote about the problem of ticket resellers creating website names that approximate that of performance venues or using names that imply they are the central ticketing source for your city. At the time, my venue saw people who had bought tickets at a big mark up or for events that weren’t actually happening once a year or so. Now that I have moved to new position in a new city, I see it happening ALL THE TIME.

Perhaps one of the reasons this issue is coming to light regularly is that we changed our seating configuration about two years ago resulting in the removal of two rows and various individual seats. The resellers are selling people tickets to those non-existent seats so the problems is very evident very quickly. I just attended a meeting of colleagues around the state and many of them are reporting similar issues with ticket resellers.

Right around Christmas this year, we had a show cancel and in the process of issuing refunds, we had to tell a gentleman that we couldn’t process a refund to his credit card because it wasn’t the card that purchased the tickets–it was the ticket resller’s. He was irate to say the least, especially since he paid about triple the actual cost of the tickets. He demanded we call the company and tell them the show was cancelled since he felt, perhaps correctly, that they wouldn’t believe him.

Much to my surprise, after waiting on hold for quite some time, I was able to get the company to process a refund for him.

We include a warning in all our email newsletters encouraging people to only purchase from us–but that only reaches people who have already successfully purchased tickets from us, not those wishing to attend for the first time.

If you are running into this, there are a couple things you can do. First is to do an online search using various terms like “tickets venuename theater yourtown,” varying the order and removing your venue name and only using generic terms like theater, dance, music. See what sites come up and see what they are selling your tickets for.

Contacting them to tell them to stop probably won’t work, but at least you will be aware of what customers might be seeing.  I don’t know if Google is doing a better job fighting  SEO attempts by these sites, but when I ran a search before writing this post, there were far fewer reseller sites appearing as results before my venue or even on the first page than there were in December.

However, the one that did come up before us is offering tickets in rows that no longer exist to a show that sold out in October.

Something we have done is worked with our ticket vendor to disallow credit card sales from out of state ZIP codes. We are smack in the middle of a state so it isn’t a big deal. Even if you are on a border, you may be able to do this for a significant geographic region across borders. Most ticket reseller purchases we have encountered are from the West Coast or Mountain West.

Be aware though that resellers get around this by using Visa/MasterCard branded gift cards which don’t require ZIP codes.

Another thing to watch out for is people posting on your Facebook events page saying they bought tickets but can’t make the show, encouraging people to send them a direct message and they will sell them cheaply.

Generally what these people, as well as many of the reseller sites will do, is place an order with you after people have contacted them about their “extra tickets.”  I would encourage you to delete these messages when you come across them. One of the big giveaways is that the Facebook account has been created in the last couple months and the person doesn’t live anywhere near you. They probably won’t have a record of purchasing tickets from you either. They may populate their page with pictures and friends connections to add some verisimilitude, but if you look carefully there are some clues.

Today we had a guy offering tickets for an event tonight that was born in Canada, apparently lives 300 miles or so away from us in Florida and is the CEO of a company in Poland.

I am sure there are much more sophisticated techniques other groups are using on larger venues where the return on investment makes it worth it, but I figure this will provide people with a general sense of what to watch out for.

Anyone got any stories or tips they want to share?

Still More Engaging Perspectives on Museum Collections

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In the last six months it seems like I have been coming across a lot of stories about how museums tours are presenting alternative contexts for collections. Back in May I was writing about Museum Hack which is providing tours through a somewhat pop culture lens.

Since then I have come across a number of stories about efforts in Philadelphia Museums to provide tours from a number of different perspectives, including those who have lived and played around the ruins of ancient civilizations.

Last week I saw a story in the NY Times about a pilot program University of Cambridge has launched that to provide an LGBTQ+ perspective on their collections. The university recruited Dan Vo who had already established himself as a figure in alternative museum tours to help them develop their series.

His Polar Museum tour highlighted artfully carved whale teeth known as scrimshaw — a way of occupying male whalers so that they didn’t have sex with each other, Mr. Vo said — and items from indigenous communities that showed how fluid gender roles were in some Arctic populations.

Tours like these are important for the future of museums, Mr. Vo said in an interview later. “It makes them relevant,” he said, “and people want to see themselves reflected in collections.”

The article quotes Alistair Brown, policy officer at the Museums Association who says museums

“are looking at radical ways of reappraising their collections,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re either inviting critical and diverse voices into the museum, or at least welcoming their presence if uninvited.”

Some of the tours aren’t as welcome as others. The NY Times also highlighted Uncomfortable Art tours given by Alice Procter which highlight the imperialism and colonialism underlying museum acquisitions. She has received death threats because promotional images on her website label Queen Elizabeth I as a slaver and Queen Victoria as a thief. The British Museum created a tour series of their own in response to Procter’s which highlights the specific provenance of objects in their collection.

Examples like these (including the ones I cited in earlier posts) can provide a real sense of the potential inherent in museum collections and the type of things people are curious to know.  It also highlights the type of details arts organizations should know about their offerings whether it is museum objects or works being performed.

It has only just started to occur to me that this is a result of the development of Professional-Amateurs predicted 15 years ago and has become something that can both challenge and threaten arts organizations and greatly enhance the work they do.

Art Lovers Of The World Rise Up!…Now Sit And Relax In Another Gallery

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Via Arts Professional UK is a Guardian story on a study that found people under 30 in the UK are twice as likely to visit a museum or gallery each month in order to de-stress.

The charity’s report, Calm and Collected, put together last year, revealed that regularly engaging with museums and galleries contributes to a sense of wellbeing. The survey of 2,500 adults showed that under-30s tend to feel much more satisfied than older visitors.

Overall, the survey found that 65% of people under 30 had felt some level of anxiety in the previous 24 hours and that they were twice as likely as others to use monthly art visits to calm down. Yet only 6% of respondents actually visited once a month or more.

Leading sources of anxiety were worry about debt and finances, at 42%, feeling lonely, and issues around social media, at 32%

Given these survey results, the Art Fund charity decided to extend eligibility for the National Art Pass discount program to people 30 and younger. Previously, only those 26 and younger were eligible.

Readers may recall that I have previously cited John Falk who wrote about recharging as one of the five identify categories motivating people to visit museums. When I have read the piece, I always assumed that rechargers which Falk lists last was the least influential motivator. It may very well have been when he did his research prior to publishing the book in 2009. Perhaps it bears re-evaluating the experience being offered in visual arts venues to resonate more with this need. (Not to mention the hours during which it is available).

While the title of the Guardian piece is “Forget yoga, under-30s use museums and galleries to de-stress,” I have come across a few museums and galleries that offer yoga classes in their spaces so they aren’t mutually exclusive.

I was still half tempted to make the title of this post “Forget Navel Gazing, Art Gazing Is The New Way To De-stress”

This Intermission Isn’t Big Enough For Bar And Bathroom Lines

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Last month I made a post about the evolution of women’s restroom lounges resulting in a short, but interesting exchange about theater restroom facilities in Germany and Sweden.   Last week The Stage had the results of a survey of West End theater restrooms which further reinforced the fact that historical theaters have a tough time providing facilities to meet the usage habits of modern day audiences. (my emphasis)

At the 42 theatres counted, there is one toilet for every 26 people, with this number increasing to one toilet for every 38 female audience members – an indication of the under-provision of facilities for women.

At capacity, the average theatre would need a 57-minute interval – nearly three times the standard length of 20 minutes – to allow all women to go to the toilet, presuming each woman takes 90 seconds.

Note this is averaged across the 42 theatres. According to the article, “the Old Vic has just one toilet for every 56.7 women.”

They arrived at the gender specific ratios based on the finding in a 2010 survey that females comprise 68% of audiences and then applying that to the full attendance capacity of a venue.

I have no idea how they arrived at the 90 second standard for using the toilet.

Perhaps part of the problem isn’t insufficient number of toilets, it is that women aren’t as competitive as men when it comes to urinating. Put time clocks on stalls and offer discounts at the bar for finishing under 60 seconds, problem solved.

If you are planning an excursion to see shows in London, you might be better off at the National Theatre which has the best ratio of 13.3/person (180 toilets, by the way). The Royal Court and Royal Opera House hover just slightly behind that ratio.

Accessible and gender neutral facilities have worse numbers:

Another area in which theatres routinely under-perform is accessibility: 26 (62%) of the 42 theatres counted had just one disabled toilet, with two – the Ambassadors and Wyndham’s – offering no accessible toilets at all.

While most theatres cater for men and women separately, a handful, including the Royal Court, the NT and the ROH, offer gender-neutral facilities. The Royal Court is currently unique in that all of its toilet cubicles are gender neutral, meaning they are available to people of any gender.

I found that last sentence interesting because when I wrote last month about the evolution of restroom lounges, I noted that the very first public restrooms in the US were gender neutral because they were individual cubicles rather than the more communal arrangements we have today. The best approach for restrooms may be to go retro.  (I am not sure what the set up is at the Royal Court, but given that European restroom stalls tend to be enclosed floor to ceiling it is possible to offer individual gender neutral private cubicles without needing much more additional space.)