As I’ve said before, if you were not able to buy tickets when they initially went on sale – wait until the day of the show. Do not panic and pay two or three times the price of the tickets on the secondary market.
Here are two examples of why to wait and our day of show ticket buying tips:
Taylor Swift at Valley View Casino Center in San Diego, CA
Tickets had been sold out for weeks leading up to the show. The morning of the concert, there were 179 tickets on StubHub with the cheapest being $140 (cheapest face value ticket through Ticketmaster was $47.25).
The prices started to drop during the day to $99 for tickets, but still essentially twice as much than face value.
At 11:49am California time, tickets were available using the Live Nation mobile app. Pairs and four-packs were available for face value. The seats were beside/behind the stage, but you weren’t having to pay scalpers’ prices.
Well, all of the scalpers did indeed gobble them up and put them up on StubHub. That afternoon, there were 206 tickets available with the lowest price, $52 per ticket.
At 1:21pm, Ticketmaster stopped selling tickets over the internet and mobile apps. Prices then started to slowly climb again on StubHub settling in at $77 per ticket two hours prior to the show.
So here were the trends during the day for this concert on StubHub and why you should not pull the trigger on spending too much for tickets:
Bruno Mars at Toyota Center in Houston, TX
After playing the Houston Rodeo in March, this was another hot ticket. Again, this one was sold out and very popular.
This one was a little different than the Taylor Swift show. The Toyota Center uses something called Flash Seats, which are electronic seats that cannot be sold on StubHub, so only locals can use them (especially when buying a few hours before the show with little time to resell them).
At 1:49pm there were tickets available on the Toyota Center website and they were excellent seats right next to the stage. The crazy thing was tickets were being sold on StubHub for $250/pair BEHIND the stage and were only $192/pair through the venue.
Ticket Crusader Tip: Set a StubHub price alert for the event you want at a low price. Once you get the alert, start checking the Live Nation or Ticketmaster (remember, they are the same thing) mobile apps for seats. Odds are ticket prices are dropping because tickets are being released and the apps are the best way to grab them.
