The General Manager of Revolution Place applauds the province for its ban on ticket bots but says the problem hasn’t made its way to Grande Prairie yet. Scott Clark says ticket bots have always been a problem for the events industry, especially in bigger buildings.
“It’s certainly an issue with the 15-20,000 seat plus buildings and it has been a problem in the industry for a number of years now but not in our building.”
A bot is a piece of computer software designed to buy tickets from real sellers before fans can which leads to a limited availability of tickets, inflated prices on resale websites and the possibility of ticket fraud. Clark says that the ban will ensure more fans get a chance to see the events they want to see without fighting with bots.
“It just means a fairer process rather than resellers clogging up the system with computer programs and purchasing inventory or holding on to inventory that they have no interest in.”
To help enforce the ban, sellers would be required to monitor their sales closely, cancelling those they believe to be from bots. Clark says that even though Revolution Place hasn’t experienced any bots in the last two years they will continue to monitor their sales.
“We’ll be watching to make sure that that continues to be the case because we do get concerned about our customers and we want to make sure that when they want to purchase tickets for an event in our building that they’re going to revolutionplace.com and not one of the knockoff sites.”
Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan are currently the only provinces in Canada with a ban on ticket bots.
