Viagogo has put all its employees at its customer service centre in Limerick, Ireland on protective notice for 30 days due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with the potential for redundancies.
An “important notice to staff” sent to the centre’s 170 employees said, according to the Limerick Leader, that the degree of impact on the business will depend on the “severity and length of disruption” by the Covid-19 crisis that has brought the live events industry to a standstill.
The protective notice could result in a number of full-time employees being moved to a part-time work schedule, while others will be asked to take “temporary leave.”
A Viagogo spokesperson told TheTicketingBusiness: “The result of this unfortunate and uncertain environment, is that some redundancies may occur but we have not decided or acted upon this, and naturally it will be a last resort. Our customer service centre in Limerick and its staff remain a vital part of the Viagogo Group of companies, and we do not make any of these decisions lightly.”
The move is similar to last month’s steps taken by StubHub, which has been bought out by Viagogo for $4.05bn, in which it furloughed two-thirds of its workforce through June due to the impact of Covid-19 on the industry.
The company has since angered fans by making a U-turn on its refund policy in response to the pandemic. The move has sparked a class-action lawsuit, which claimed StubHub “sought to surreptitiously shift their losses onto their innocent customers.”
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