OASIS: tickets resell for £6000

[AM9]

Surge/dynamic pricing is totally legal. Charging £500 for an Oasis ticket is totally legal. But…..

Telling people that tickets would go to £135 max and then charging £500 will get you into trouble. Putting a ‘buy or lose them’ time pressure on purchasers suddenly discovering the actual price will amplify the problem. These are the issues under investigation, not surge pricing itself.

Have they been charging more than an earlier price at the time of the buyer committing to the deal? I don't think so.

 

[Adam Williams]

Telling people that tickets would go to £135 max and then charging £500 will get you into trouble

Isn't this exactly what some parts of the rail industry do?

They tell you the theoretical maximum (the walk-up standard class Anytime ticket) and then set the mandatory reservations flag and pretend the ticket is unavailable/invalid for a specific busy train (despite being available at ticket offices/TVMs and the tickets being perfectly valid for travel). Retailers then flog first class advances / first class walk-ups, because they're the only things with quota left (all the while the quotas at each price point are being adjusted dynamically by a computer according to demand), and the customer overpays accordingly.

I fail to see the difference! Except of course that in one instance it's a government controlled operator doing it, and in the other case it's a private company.

 

[AM9]

Isn't this exactly what some parts of the rail industry do?

They tell you the theoretical maximum (the walk-up standard class Anytime ticket) and then set the mandatory reservations flag and pretend the ticket is unavailable/invalid for a specific busy train (despite being available at ticket offices/TVMs and the tickets being perfectly valid for travel). Retailers then flog first class advances / first class walk-ups, because they're the only things with quota left (all the while the quotas at each price point are being adjusted dynamically by a computer according to demand), and the customer overpays accordingly.

I fail to see the difference! Except of course that in one instance it's a government controlled operator doing it, and in the other case it's a private company.

There's a lot of difference between an event that keeps some entertained for a few hours and a transport system that may carry people who need to get from A to B. Being unable to afford a ticket (or get one at any price) to enable people them to access a venue to hear and watch a music event*, bears no comparison to a person who cannot get to work/attend a hospital appointment etc..

* also true for any other restricted availability 'entertainment event including more formal music, plays, ballet, non-participant sport etc..

 

[RJ]

Isn't this exactly what some parts of the rail industry do?

They tell you the theoretical maximum (the walk-up standard class Anytime ticket) and then set the mandatory reservations flag and pretend the ticket is unavailable/invalid for a specific busy train (despite being available at ticket offices/TVMs and the tickets being perfectly valid for travel). Retailers then flog first class advances / first class walk-ups, because they're the only things with quota left (all the while the quotas at each price point are being adjusted dynamically by a computer according to demand), and the customer overpays accordingly.

I fail to see the difference! Except of course that in one instance it's a government controlled operator doing it, and in the other case it's a private company.

Bit of a stretch, there is no limit to the availability of walk-up fares, unless you choose to use websites that do so.

 

[Adam Williams]

Bit of a stretch, there is no limit to the availability of walk-up fares, unless you choose to use websites that do so.

Anyone that does journey planning has to enforce it, though. That's increasing numbers of TVMs, all websites that allow you to do journey planning to buy tickets and even some ticket office mTIS. There are some workarounds here that 0.5% of people may know and understand, sure.

 

[Hadders]

Isn't this exactly what some parts of the rail industry do?

Absolutely, it is what the rail industry does. But the Government is quite happy to have surge pricing on the railway. Maybe we should refer to LNER's ticket trials as 'Oasis style' ticketing to get the message across about what is happening....

Those of us on here who take an interest in these sort of matters will find workarounds but we're not the target market for these trials. 99.5% of regular passengers will end up getting fleeced by the surge pricing regime.