The summer festival ensures that no anomaly was detected during Wednesday’s record-breaking sale of 125,000 tickets for the concerts of its 2023 vintage.
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Since the FEQ announced that all of its tickets sold out in less than two hours, several people have complained on social media that passes are already being offered on resale sites.
“We understand the world’s disappointment, we’ve seen the comments and we’ve delved into the question. To our knowledge, there is no anomaly in the buying process. There is no massive purchase that has been pointed out anywhere,” says FEQ Vice President of Communications Samantha McKinley.
According to the latter, two indicators show that the purchases made are legitimate: the average number of tickets sold per transaction has fallen compared to last year and the return rate, i.e. customers from 2022 who redeem in 2023, is “extremely high”.
“It makes us think we weren’t in a wave of robots making massive purchases.”
However, she refused to provide this data to the journal because it is strategic business information.
Cannot be waterproof
How the festival tries to trick dealers? By authorizing just one credit card transaction, limiting the number of tickets to four per transaction, and monitoring the flow of shoppers at the box office.
Despite this, Samantha McKinley recognizes that, like all major events, the FEQ cannot be 100% watertight against resellers.
However, she notes that resale sites don’t currently have many tickets for sale. For example, 24 general admission tickets were displayed on the billets.ca website on Thursday morning.
“I’m not in a position to compare to 2022, but right now when I look, the number seems extremely low,” she said.
Buyer in a hurry
Ms McKinley also hypothesizes that more shoppers bought early for fear of missing out, as was the case for many festival-goers in 2022.
“For several weeks, all indicators have been flashing green, visible from the moon. The number of messages we received asking for tickets even before the line up was out was overwhelming. Web indicators, open rates, everything was in the ceiling. We felt it was coming, but we had no idea how heavy and how fast it would be. »
Could we limit the number of tickets per transaction to two or even shift the time of sale? The FEQ says it’s ready to analyze it, but there are bound to be pros and cons. “Bringing it down to two would inevitably cause headaches for families trying to buy three or four,” concludes Samantha McKinley.
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