Part III of our ‘Buying Sports and Concert Tickets: The Expert Series‘
Sports and concert ticket search has come a long way as the ticketing industry has continued to evolve. In previous posts we outlined this evolution by highlighting all the ways you can buy in both the primary ticket market and secondary ticket market. Now we will drill down specifically on web based applications and provide 4 tips for finding great tickets using ticket search engines.
Ticket Search: Tips
1) Don’t go to a single ticket marketplace
When you need plane tickets, do you go straight to delta.com (or any other single airline’s site) and blindly buy the best deal they have? Probabl
y not, because there’s a good chance another airline has a better deal–smart shoppers go to travel search engines like kayak where they can see all tickets that are available in a single place.
The same dynamic applies for sports and concert tickets. Many folks in need of sports/concert tickets go straight to Ticketmaster or StubHub and buy the best deal they find. By doing that, you could be missing out on better deals available elsewhere…so…
2) Use a ticket search engine
You are searching for tickets, not just a ticket site. There are a few ticket search sites available including FanSnap, Tickex, and us at SeatGeek (of course). The benefits of these sites include:
Aggregation of tickets from major secondary ticket sites – this provides a comprehensive view of what is available
Ticket price comparisons
Free service – you don’t pay a dime more for these additional features
At SeatGeek we supplement search with ticket forecasts
SeatGeek co-founder Russ D’Souza says, “We’ve noticed that our users are largely agnostic about where they buy their tickets. They just want to get the best deal and know that they will get the ticket in time for the event. Using a search engine allows these consumers to find the best deal across a variety of vendors whereas Google only shows a small sliver of ticket sellers.”
3) Use advanced filters
Filters allow you to drill-down on ticket information to find exactly what you are looking for
Filtering facilitates deal discovery by sorting by price as a % of the ticket’s face value
Budget buying with filters is a great technique that can be executed by sorting tickets from lowest-to-highest price
4) Take advantage of alerts
Ticket search engines provide access to a vast inventory of tickets – you can set up alerts that let you know when any of the major sites is offering a price that fits your budget
With SeatGeek, you can utilize our forecasts and recommendations to complement alerts – if ticket prices are forecasted to go down, set up an alert for your target price and we will let you know when prices reach that level so you won’t miss out
