Industry News

Ticketmaster ‘best available’ Platinum tickets claim banned

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned Ticketmaster from claiming its Platinum tickets are the ‘best available’ after complaints that the passes offered no real benefits compared to general seating.

The ASA received three complaints that these supposed ‘best available’ tickets misled fans and were not accurately presented.

Ticketmaster’s website said Platinum “offers fans the best available tickets for an event direct from the artist”. It continued that it gave fans “fair and safe access to the best available tickets, while enabling artists … to price tickets closer to their true value.”

After the ASA launched an investigation, Ticketmaster said it believed consumers were likely to interpret the claim ‘best available tickets’ to mean the top passes offered at the time they were making their booking.

In addition, the ticketing giant said it believed the claim was relevant only to that specific point in time and was not a retrospective statement. They did not believe consumers were likely to interpret the claim to mean they would be purchasing the best tickets that had ever been sold for that event.

However, the ASA said consumers were more likely to interpret the ‘best available’ claim to mean those tickets were better than any other available at that time.

Platinum tickets were clearly on sale at the same time as general tickets, with “no discernible difference between the two”. It also found that platinum tickets were likely to be more expensive than the general tickets.

The ASA ruled: “The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Ticketmaster UK Ltd not to claim in future that their Platinum tickets were ‘the best available tickets’ if that was not the case.”

A Ticketmaster spokeswoman said: “The wording … on our website was changed over a year ago.”