Ticket Brokering is (still) a Booming Business on the Net

  Some people feel strongly that reselling tickets (or “scalping”) is a serious crime that should be punished. After all, many jurisdictions around the country have laws preventing people from reselling passes to popular sporting events, airline miles and ski lift tickets.

(PRWEB) October 19, 2004 -- We believe that the people who support these laws should take a good look at how ticket brokering (or trading) is being cleanly conducted on the Internet and the invaluable advertising and exposure that is generated for the ski resorts themselves, the supposed “victims” of scalping. Via the Internet, scalping really is becoming a win-win situation for both skiers and resort management. After all, advertising brings skiers/boarders and those folks keep the resorts in business.

Ticket scalpers in the business of collecting discounted ski ticket vouchers and reselling them, thereby promoting the best ski deals currently available around the country. This naturally generates a tremendous amount of excitement and exposure for the resorts on the eve of the season and beyond. Ticket brokering and trading is a real booming business on the Internet, especially through popular auction sites like eBay and Yahoo. Reaction from skiers and snowboarders is clearly positive, but from the resort owners? Well, that is decidedly mixed.

Obviously, not all resorts are “hip” to what could really benefit them in the long run. Who wouldn´t want free advertising, after all? But rather than looking at where we are, let us first look at how we got here.

“We had started a website called Slide4less and we approached some ski show/expo promoters and made a couple of deals to sell some tickets for the shows,” said Slide4less co-owner Darren Romar. “But every ski deal we made at that time pretty much sucked. In one deal, we bought $14,000 worth of show tickets for resale, only to have an apparently desperate promoter undercut the price, making it impossible for us to resell the tickets as agreed. We had to eat the $14,000.”

“That wasn´t the only deal like that,” Romar added. “After that one in particular, though, we decided to have a bunch of friends go to a show and get free lift tickets and then we had a great idea! We had so many tickets that trying to pawn a few at the resort was too much of a hassle, so we started selling them on eBay.”

Little could Romar have known, however, that reselling ticket vouchers on the Internet would become such an incredibly thriving business practiced by hundreds of sellers and thousands of buyers around the world every day.

“But selling them on eBay is tough going,” he explained. “People didn´t know where to look for lift tickets on eBay so we had to create a market. We wrote a book called the ´Ski Bum´s Guide.´ We printed 500 copies and sold them on eBay. We also passed some out to people selling tickets in the resort parking lots. The guide told them how we sold tickets on eBay. We figured that selling tickets like that wasn´t anymore illegal than re-selling sports tickets. After all, the resorts can appeal to ebay and other venues and have illegal sales removed, if they are really illegal. The problem is they can’t get them off there because it’s the same as re-selling a pro football tioket. They still try to intimidate people into taking them off ebay, but the tickets keep showing up.”

Romar and his partner, Steve Steinberg, have learned a lot in a short time from their experiences, and despite attempts to quash ticket brokering in some areas, trading and reselling ski lift tickets on the Internet is as robust as ever.

People trade the tickets and it exposes the resort to a different set of patrons than they normally advertise to, not to mention the family and friends those people will bring with them up to the hill. It also encourages scalpers to get out of the parking lot and start generating some free advertising for the resorts on the Internet.”

We’re still looking for feedback from skiers, snowboarders, resort personnel and managers on what they think about ticket brokering on the Internet. Those with an opinion on the subject should write to e-mail protected from spam bots and also pay a visit to the website at www.skibumsguide.com for more information.

Either way you look at it, many new skiers and snowboarders are getting up on the hill to enjoy the snowy summits and isn´t that what we are all in this for – having some fun in the snow?

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