Last month, a patron showed up at our Box Office, asking if we had cheaper tickets than the ones she had found online. We asked her what she had found. “Just the $200 tickets on your website,” she said.
This couldn’t be true, of course: the tickets on our website range from $30 to $100. We helped her buy a $45 ticket in our Mezzanine, and chalked it up to a misunderstanding.
When a charming young couple came to the window the next day, asking about the same $230 tickets, alarm bells went off. Sure enough
These people—some of them long-time Playhouse devotees, some of them first-time vistors—had all stumbled across the same dishonest scheme: ticket agents are marking up our tickets by as much as 400%, even when performances are not sold out. These “resellers” aren’t typical scalpers; they don’t actually hold any ticket inventory, and they don’t have any relationship to our box office. Instead, they until they sell their $200 tickets on their own website, and then turn around and buy the tickets on ours.
“Ticket agents are marking up our tickets by as much as 400%, even when performances are not sold out.”
The main culprits are box-officetickets.com and ticketofficesales.com, two websites that appear to be operated by the same company.
A scalper known as Secure-Tix operates both box-officetickets.com and ticketofficesales.com, and controls the top two ad placements on Google. San Francisco Playhouse’s official site is in the third position.
San Francisco Playhouse
450 Post St.
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 677-9596
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A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Tax ID: 86-1089699
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