Al-Istiqlal National Newspaper The National Venue Association (NIVA) is calling on Yelp to remove misleading or fake concert ticket listings on the sites' Yelp pages, with NIVA sending a letter to the company's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman late Tuesday demanding the listings be removed.
In the letter, NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker wrote that Yelp “redirects users from purchasing legitimate tickets at face value from small businesses and nonprofits, and instead sends them to the Yelp-branded TicketNetwork site that inflates prices and sells counterfeit tickets.”
“This is a brand that has gained a lot of trust in transparency and acting as an impartial arbiter of customer reviews,” says Parker. Rolling Stone“On the surface, Yelp is a brand that has nothing to do with tickets, but now that we've dug deeper into these deceptive links that exist, we find that they're leading consumers down a path where they either pay more money than they need to, or get tickets that ultimately won't work.”
Showing tickets on Yelp doesn’t appear to be a new feature, as the company announced a partnership with TicketNetwork in 2016 to bring its ticket resale service platform directly to Yelp. In a press release at the time, the companies said the feature “allows Yelp users to transact with a local business without ever leaving the Yelp site.”
But NIVA says it only discovered the feature this month when some concert venue members saw listings on their Yelp pages that the organization said mislead ticket buyers into thinking they were buying directly from the concert venues when in fact they were using “a ticketing platform operated by a company with a long history of anti-competitive and exploitative practices,” NIVA alleged.
A representative for the organization said NIVA members began contacting Yelp in early August, but everyone was directed to speak with TicketNetwork. The representative added that NIVA itself began reaching out to Yelp about a week ago, sharing examples with the company’s leadership, but they have not heard back.
A Yelp representative did not immediately respond. Rolling Stones Request comment.
In the letter, NIVA shared several screenshots provided by member venues, including an instance in which four tickets to next month's “Comedy Gumbeaux” at Howlin' Wolf in New Orleans were sold on Yelp for $750, versus the $50 face value the venue was selling them for on its website.
NIVA also shared screenshots of ticket listings at the Fox Theater in Boulder and the Crafthouse Theater and Grill in Pittsburgh for shows that weren't already scheduled at the concert venues. (When Rolling Stone When we click on links to offers that are not listed, we get a message saying “Sorry, there are no results for this event.”
Another screenshot showed the ticket purchase process for a seating section that does not exist at the concert venue, while also showing a “venue policy” that is not actually the venue’s ticketing policy, according to NIVA.
The ticket page for the Cigarettes After Sex show at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland features so-called “scalping tickets,” or tickets that the seller doesn’t actually own. The practice has been controversial among critics who claim it’s nothing more than a scam, and has recently been banned in several states including Maryland and Minnesota.
TicketNetwork is a well-known platform that allows concertgoers as well as brokers and speculators to buy and sell tickets. It has faced controversy before, NIVA noted in the letter, with the company settling complaints with the Federal Trade Commission as well as the New York Attorney General and the Canadian Competition Bureau in recent years.
TicketNetwork did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Parker said Rolling Stone This situation also reflects the need for Congress to pass the Fans First Act, which if passed would seek to crack down on certain issues in the secondary market including ticket scalping and the use of bots to buy tickets to shows.
“We urge Yelp to take immediate corrective action to protect consumers, uphold the integrity of independent platforms, and preserve the trust of millions of users who rely on Yelp for accurate and truthful information,” Parker wrote in a letter to Stoppelman on Tuesday. “Every day that these deceptive practices continue, the fabric of our communities is eroded, and the unique cultural experiences that independent platforms provide are at risk.”
