‘Scalped’
Elton John tickets
will be honored
The city's authorized vendor had
By Tim Ryan
threatened to not accept the tickets
to the rock star's Honolulu
concerts in January
Star-BulletinPeople who bought tickets from a mainland broker for Elton John concerts next month will be allowed to attend despite an earlier warning that those tickets would be confiscated.
PrimeTime Tickets, a ticket brokering company based in Tempe, Ariz., is selling tickets for the Jan. 7 and 8 concerts for $95 to $295 -- up to 4 times their face value. However, the company is not an authorized ticket agent for the concerts.
Promoter Tom Moffatt and Elton John's management set prices at $45 and $65 with a limit of six tickets per buyer. About 23,000 seats were available for the John concerts, including a third one Jan. 9. PrimeTime has less than 1 percent of the available seats.
Two $295 tickets from PrimeTime are in second row center for opening night; 20 premium seats are available for the second night in rows 6, 7, 13, 25 and 30, for $145 to $225.
Elton John tickets are available online at: ELTON JOHN TICKETS
http://www.ticketslive.com
(About 100 tickets remain for the first two concerts, and 2,000 are available for the third night.)
"What (PrimeTime) is doing is scalping," said Manuel Sanchez, chief executive officer for Ticket Plus Inc., the city's authorized ticket vendor. "They're liars if they say they're not scalping tickets."
Ticket scalping refers to the business of obtaining tickets to concerts, games and other events and then reselling the tickets for a higher price, often far above the original box office price.
All tickets bought by PrimeTime for the John concerts contain restrictive language prohibiting resale for a price exceeding the original purchase price. Earlier this week, Sanchez said tickets purchased through PrimeTime would not be honored and customers denied admission.
But jurisdiction for honoring tickets for Blaisdell Center events belongs to the center staff, not the ticket distributor, said John Fuhrmann, Blaisdell Center events manager.
"We will honor any tickets which have been purchased from PrimeTime ... for the Elton John event," he said. "The city believes the public was unaware of purchase restrictions on such tickets and it would be unfair to not honor the tickets in this instance."
Late yesterday, Sanchez said his company's intent is to stop the mass ordering of tickets by scalpers and not to punish people who want to purchase concert tickets. Sanchez said he agrees with the city's position to allow all people holding "genuine tickets" to be admitted to the John concert.
Though Hawaii has no law against scalping, only certain businesses are authorized by the artist and promoter to sell tickets, Fuhrmann, Sanchez and Moffatt agreed.
Tiffany Tavares Lynum, PrimeTime vice president, said Sanchez is threatening to punish her clients for choosing to pay for "the convenience of not having to stand in line."
Nick Lynum, PrimeTime chief executive officer, said from his Tempe office that the company provides "a service to the consumer who wants a ticket for a sold-out event or a high-quality seat to an event."
Information obtained by the Star-Bulletin shows names and addresses of 45 out-of-state people -- primarily from Georgia, Nebraska, Florida and California -- who bought at least 200 of the Elton John concert tickets by credit card over the Internet and then sold them to PrimeTime.
They include 16 Texas residents who bought 92 tickets. The records also show some people bought as many as 10 tickets -- four more than the limit.
Nick Lynum said that since the company buys tickets from people who have bought them, the ticket limit rule doesn't apply to PrimeTime, which uses "various channels" -- the Internet, people standing in line, those who place orders on the telephone -- to acquire tickets.
Restrictive language on the John tickets are on "virtually all tickets the company buys and no one ever enforces it," Lynum said.
"We just don't want to see what's happening on the mainland happen here" where ticket brokers often sell tickets for hundreds of dollars more than face value, said Barbara Hallberg, general manager for Tom Moffatt Productions. "This incident is the most blatant it's ever been.
"People who live here and want to see Elton John after 20 years should not have to put up with this. If they want to be in the second row they should have a fair crack at it at the face value of the ticket."
