A Massachusetts father is spending $21,000 on last-minute tickets for his daughter and her friends to Taylor Swift’s sold-out May 19 concert. The original tickets were never sent.
In November, Anthony Silva bought four tickets for Taylor Swift’s The Era’s Tour at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. It was a Christmas present for his 19-year-old daughter, Katlyn, according to the New York Post news agency.
The four tickets he bought on StubHub for the show totaled $1,800, but days before the show, he was still empty-handed.
A few days before the show date, he decided to check another ticketing site, where he found the price of $21,000. This happened to be 11 times more expensive than the original amount.
The ticket exchange and resale company used by the father, StubHub, has a policy that tickets are only sent to the buyer the day before the event and no alternative tickets were available.
“It’s just not fair,” Silva said in an interview with WCVB. “In my opinion, you shouldn’t wait until the day before for the retailer to send you the tickets,” he says.
For Mr. Silva, paying $21,000 for tickets to upgraded seats proves StubHub’s incompetence.
He still wanted to offer his daughter an extraordinary experience by hiring a limousine for the evening.
“When we pranked the girls the night before because the tickets were lost, you should have seen the look on their faces. “I never want to see that again,” says the father.
Katlyn was disappointed and outraged at the situation when she learned the tickets hadn’t been delivered to her doorstep.
“When I got home I ran into things coming my way, I was so angry! I’ve waited nine months for this,” says the 19-year-old.
Taylor Swift was scheduled to perform three shows at Gillette Stadium, hoping 200,000 people could be there.
The show on Friday, May 19 drew more than 60,000 viewers, according to CBC data.
“Due to extreme demand for the ticketing system and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet demand, public sales for tomorrow’s tour have been cancelled,” StubHub announced.
Following the incident, more than 25 Taylor Swift fans filed legal action against TicketMaster in December, claiming the company was a scam.