| Maybe Happy Ending ticket sources | |
| Posted by: aleck 10:42 am EST 02/13/25 | |
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| Last week I posted a message here that chronicled my experience from the previous week of trying to buy tickets to Maybe Happy Ending a few days ahead of the performance. I rarely do this, but I needed to nail down tickets to satisfy out-of-town visitors. Unlike those of us who live in New York City and have the flexibility to go to TKTS at the last minute and see what’s available, the out-of-town visitors didn’t want to put themselves at risk of NOT getting to see this show on the one day they were available to go. When I was directed to TeleCharge via the official ticket source of Maybe Happy Ending, I found to my surprise there were NO tickets available that could put my party together in four adjacent seats. Nor was there any 2/2 seats. This was for all of the orchestra section and the front mezzanine. I had to buy seats scattered about. I thought, wow, this show is doing better than I thought. Yet on the day of the performance, I saw that the show was on TKTS for the entire day – from the opening of the booth right up to curtain time. Hmm, I wondered. Were there so many “house seats” that had lapsed in order to fulfill three hours of TKTS demand? To test that situation, I decided to monitor ticket availability as shown on the seat maps on TeleCharge, SeatGeek and Today’s Tix, beginning a week before the performance of Tuesday, February 11 and also to see what shows up (or doesn’t show up) on TKTS for that performance. I looked every day for a week right up to performance time while also going to TKTS at about a half hour before curtain to see what seats I could get. As everyone who uses TKTS knows, going to the booth at the last minute invariably lands you the best seats in the house. (That is if it is still available on TKTS at that time.) I always assumed that those seats were the most expensive seats that ended up not being sold and therefore were released at the last minute. Most tourists, however, think that they need to get in line as soon as the booth opens to land tickets (or buy tickets far, far in advance in the mistaken idea that the best seats have to be bought as far in advance as possible). As we know, that’s wrong. And those people (shall we say out-of-town tourists) get rewarded for standing in line at TKTS for what can sometimes be hours to get the WORST available seats and not the best. Indeed, on Tuesday at about 6:15 I landed seats F113 and F114 in the orchestra – center section, aisle. Fantastic seats. Cost? $108 each. Those seats could retail as high as over $300 on weekends and if purchased through SeatGeek, which adds a high “resale” fee, the ticket could be up to about $600 or maybe more. (I don’t monitor those things.) Waiting until the last minute, as we all know, was the best strategy. Then I looked back at the ticket availability charts of TeleCharge, etc to see when those seats I bought were available to the retail ticket buyer, willing to pay the full price. (I’ve made screen shots of the seat maps going back a week before the Feb 11 performance right up to the time I left to go to the TKTS booth – about 5:45.) When were those seats available for retail purchase? The answer: NEVER. It would have been impossible to buy those seats – at any price – outside of a trip to TKTS just before curtain. Those seats never appeared on any on-line ordering vehicle. The producers would rather sell the seats cheap than offering them at the retail price? Go figure. Then, it got more curious. When I looked at the TeleCharge seating map a week before performance, I could find only 28 seats available – and 12 of them were singletons. On the SeatGeek website there were slews of orchestra seats, but not closer than Row L. Almost all at a premium price above the posted prices you’d see at the box office – or on the official ticket site, TeleCharge. On performance date at 3pm, when the TKTS booth opened, there were 41 orchestra seats available on TeleCharge, with 9 of them singletons. There were NO seats in Row F, where I ended up. Over at SeatGeek, there were tons of orchestra seats, ranging in price from $268 to $550. There were seats available through this source in Row F. But unless you were ready to buy you couldn’t tell exactly where those seats were. I don’t know if the seats I got were really SeatGeek tickets that somehow migrated to TKTS at the last minute. But aren’t all TKTS tickets sourced solely from the box office? But back further beyond Row L, there were tons of seats offered on SeatGeek. I wondered how could SeatGeek sell all those seats in three hours? I thought, wow, they are going to get stuck with them. My understanding is that SeatGeek works by either buying up seats when they become available at the box office as a kind of scalper, taking a chance they would be able to sell them, or they are reselling tickets from people who need to unload tickets because for one reason or another couldn’t make it to the performance. When I showed up at the theatre, I was surprised to see that every seat in the orchestra section was occupied. SeatGeek had been able to sell all those seats at the inflated prices in less than three hours for a show that is not a megahit? Not to be too judgmental, but those people in the seats in the rear of the orchestra section did not look like folks who were shelling out $500. Also, I noted that those people in the rear of the theatre took those seats right at the time the door opened, after obediently standing in line outside like people from parts of the world who obey all the rules, like waiting for the crosswalk light to change. Were any of those people the ones who lined up at TKTS when it opened at 3? If so, they sure didn’t get those TKTS tickets from those available from the box office. I failed to ask the people back there where they got their tickets. I would be curious if any of those SeatGeek tickets somehow ended up at TKTS. Is there some type of special arrangement with TKTS to take on the leftover seats from SeatGeek? I don’t think there should have been one ticket that ended up at TKTS after being promoted as being a resell ticket – or not available on the TeleCharge site. Or does SeatGeek have an arrangement with the box office to hand back the seats they don’t sell so that the box office can sell them at TKTS? What’s legal vis a vis TKTS? Educate me as to what’s going on here. I'm not just raising this issue for Maybe Happy Ending (which is a FANTASTIC show) but for all ticket selling matters at all B'Way theatres. |
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