What sorcery is this? A £140 ticket for new Harry Potter play now costs £8,327

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/aug/13/harry-potter-cursed-child-ticket-resale-prices

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Tickets for the hit West End Harry Potter play are on sale for more than £8,300 on reselling website Viagogo, prompting the producers to denounce the “plague” of online touting.

Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender also warned that fans who shell out thousands for tickets to Harry Potter & the Cursed Child from Viagogo and other secondary ticketing websites could be refused entry at the theatre door.

The play, staged in two parts at the Palace Theatre in London, has broken box office records, with fans spending hours in online queues to secure a seat. But while many devotees of JK Rowling’s schoolboy wizard franchise have been unable to get their hands on tickets, they are available through secondary ticketing websites for many times face value.

One ticket in the stalls to see just part two of the play on 3 March next year will cost fans £8,327.19, including a £1,772.53 booking fee paid to Viagogo.

StubHub, owned by eBay, lists a ticket to see both parts of the play on 8 April for £4,999. Viagogo and StubHub did not respond to requests for comment. The highest-priced ticket on the official website of Nimax Theatres, which owns the Palace, is £140.

The play’s producers attacked those trying to make a profit out of fans’ desperation to see the play, which has proved so popular that some Harry Potter fans have been travelling to London from other countries to see it.

“The secondary ticket market is an industry-wide plague, and one which we as producers take very seriously,” Friedman and Callender said in a statement. “Our priority is to protect all our customers and we are doing all we can to combat this issue.”

They said that anyone prepared to fork out thousands for a ticket could still be turned away at the door.

“We have already been able to identify, and refuse entry, to a significant number of people who purchased tickets through resale sites and will continue to track down touts and refuse entry to anyone who has knowingly bought a ticket from a tout through the secondary market.”

Staff at the Palace Theatre have been told to refuse entry for tickets that they are able to identify as resold.

Anyone turned away will be given a “refusal of entry” letter, allowing them to contact the websites to ask for their money back.

Tickets for the play by Jack Thorne – based on a new story by himself, author Rowling and John Tiffany – which started its West End run in June and will continue until December 2017, have proved hugely popular.

Some 250,000 new tickets were put on sale last week and sold out on the day, which prompted the producers to add new dates to be announced later this year.

As well as the tickets advertised on Viagogo and StubHub, hundreds are listed on rival sites for similarly eye-watering sums. GetMeIn, owned by Ticketmaster, has tickets to both parts of the show listed for £1,098, while Seatwave is selling them for up to £1,717.15.

Harry Potter fan Elizabeth Sudlow, 22, hoped to see the play on a visit to London but was unable to get tickets through official channels and unwilling to pay such huge mark-ups.

“We considered doing that but we were worried about overblowing our budget,” she said. “It was basically the price of my trip to London and Edinburgh. It’s disappointing because they know that there’s a good chance someone will pay that price eventually because they are so keen to see the play. It’s definitely exploitation.”

Kat Miller, marketing director at the Harry Potter fan site MuggleNet, said touts were profiteering from fans’ passion for the books. “We’ve seen fans from all over the world flying to London to see it because it isn’t on in the US,” she said.

“Your only shot if you’re desperate to see it is something like StubHub. If you’ve been saving up to go to London and you’re a giant Harry Potter fan, it feels like you’re missing out if you’re not there.”

Ticket resale has come under increased scrutiny amid evidence that touts are making huge profits by snapping up tickets at the expense of music, sports and theatre fans, using techniques not available to most people.

A government-backed review led by Michael Waterson, professor of economics at the University of Warwick, recommended reforms earlier this year and pressure is now mounting on politicians to introduce legislation to curb touting.

Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, co-chair of a cross-party group looking into ticketing, welcomed the comments from the play’s producers but said they “cannot do all of this alone”.

“What they need is the support of the government, especially following the publication of the Waterson review earlier this year, which set out a list of recommendations that would help to address the problems seen in the secondary market,” said Hodgson, the MP for Washington and Sunderland West.

“To do that the government needs to get on with the job at hand and ensure fans are put first.”

Adam Webb, campaign manager for fan group FanFair Alliance, said: “Given the clear terms and conditions applied to the Harry Potter theatre tickets – for example, that any being resold online will be voided, and an email confirmation will be needed to access the show – it seems extraordinary that GetMeIn, Seatwave, StubHub and Viagogo are allowing them to be listed in the first place.

“That they then fail to detail any of the terms and conditions is a good indication of where their priorities lie. It’s about profits before people.

“Unfortunately, until government steps in to ensure UK consumer laws are enforced and the secondary ticketing market is properly regulated, we will continue to see fans and theatregoers fleeced in this way.”