MANCHESTER, UK (CelebrityAccess) — Some fans who purchased tickets for Ed Sheeran’s UK stadium tour were left in the cold after they were denied access to the opening night after the tickets they’d purchased through secondary ticketing website Viagogo were invalidated.
According to the BBC, promoters Kilimanjaro Live, DHP Family and AEG Presents canceled more than 10,000 tickets for the tour, which kicked off on May 24th at Manchester’s Etihad stadium.
The ticketholders had prior warning. In 2017, Kilimanjaro Live contacted ticket holders to remind them of the “very detailed” terms and conditions for venue entry and resale. The promoters urged anyone who had purchased tickets through Viagogo to seek a refund through the site offered them to buy a new ticket at the face value of £150.
Despite the warnings, hundreds of fans were reportedly angry about being asked to purchase new tickets for the concert at Etihad stadium when their Viagogo purchases were invalidated.
Kilimanjaro Live chief executive Stuart Galbraith told the BBC that anyone who couldn’t immediately afford a new ticket would be given the opportunity to purchase tickets for a different date.
“Everyone we’ve dealt with today – and we’ve dealt with hundreds – we’ve given them advice about how to receive refunds against their fraudulently traded tickets, and we’ve sold them face-value tickets. So we’ve achieved what Ed wanted us to,” Galbraith told the BBC.
“Last night produced several interesting bits of evidence of mass flouting of consumer laws and we will be referring all of the information we have gathered to the Competitions and Mergers Authority and National Trading Standards for further investigation,” he added.
Viagogo has characterized policies barring entry to fans who have secondary market tickets as “highly unfair and in our view, unenforceable and illegal.”
