Dynamic Pricing; Ok For Airlines, Not Oasis Tickets

Where were you while we were getting… ripped off?

I love when my worlds collide. Some of you will know that although loyalty and the world of travel has been a lifelong obsession and the bulk of my professional career, I actually started out in the music business. Definitely, not maybe.

Before that, as a once pot smoking teenager with an axe to grind, I naturally gravitated to the energy, joy and angst that is Oasis and never left. You can imagine my excitement when the reunion was announced.

Last weekend, after a long transatlantic flight, I set my alarm for 3:55 AM local time to join the queue for Oasis tickets. I expected it to be an exhilarating 15 minutes ending in either sublime joy or disappointment. I was prepared for both — 15 mins is 15 mins. Roll the dice!

Instead, thanks to a cacophony of errors and everyone’s new favorite learned concept, the now infamous “dynamic pricing”, it was neither — and five — yes 5 hours later I was left disappointed and furious. It’s time to explain why dynamic pricing isn’t new, but why its use in music and the Oasis pre-sale is idiotic, or at least misplaced.

Dynamic Pricing: Sensible For Airlines And Hotels

Dynamic pricing is the art of raising or lowering prices in response to demand. The hotter the ticket or commodity, the more the needle moves upwards. What’s funny, is the needle never moves down from the number the company used to hook you in — just up and often. Anyway…

Dynamic pricing also isn’t a remotely new concept in the world of travel.

Airlines price flights based on demand and always have. Travel businesses fetch higher prices during school holidays than during shoulder season and low season and the sky is also blue. It’s a lot easier to charge more when 5000 people want one of your 20 hotel rooms than when only 15 people might want one. Maximizing the good helps hedge against the bad. That’s ok!

Hold on to this “dynamic” distinction with travel: you have “off peak” opportunities to save.

Even for the same flight or hotel on a certain date within travel, the early bird often gets the worm — just don’t be too early.

Those who haven’t planned ahead, or can’t, and start searching when flight dates are approaching and cabins or rooms are filling up, typically face higher prices. Too pricey? Try different dates, airlines, hotels or destinations. There will always be other options.

Here’s the other key travel distinction with dynamic pricing: airlines and hotels dependably put their inventory out 350-365 days in advance, so you can’t pretend that you don’t have a fair chance to plan. With 365 bites at the apple, there’s something for everyone. That’s where we’ll slide away and unplug the electric guitar for now on the travel side, because it’s all obvious.

Dynamic Pricing In Music: Not The Same

When Oasis announced their Oasis Live in 25′ Tour, it was obvious within seconds that all dates would sell out immediately. Demand was n-e-v-e-r in question. Every date was red hot peak.

When Oasis announced ticket prices for the dates, they were firm but very fair and excitement was fever pitched. That all changed when everyone waited in 4-5 hour virtual waiting queues, through hundreds of thousands of digital places, only to find that tickets were gone or were being priced according to “demand”, effectively double or triple the listed cost. Yikes.

This Oasis “dynamic pricing” ordeal n-e-v-e-r offered an “off-peak” or low demand opportunity. It wasn’t dynamic at all and it wasn’t the listed price.

I have no problem when concert promoters and artists offer early bird pricing and then prices increase after the first day or so of sales. Music and food festivals regularly do this to engage and capture demand early — and it makes sense for all involved in all commercial and loyalty centric ways.

It’s great to secure funds early from your biggest fans, particularly when you can offer them better pricing in exchange for the loyalty which helps to cover costs and properly signal the demand for the event.

You see how many tickets went right away, and then you can figure the best sales strategy to dynamically price the rest. The key distinction is that it’s imperative to offer fans a fair chance at the prices listed for the event.

Oasis fans never had that chance.

Within 10 minutes of tickets going on sale, Twitter or X or whatever the f**k it wants to call itself, was rife with fury over the 2X to 3X pricing. There was no opportunity to pick an off peak date, or another airline, or a cheaper hotel. There was nothing dynamic at all, either. The prices simply skyrocketed from the moment go and stayed redlined throughout the day.

Demand was instantly peak and prices instantly followed to charge everyone the inflated price. I think it’s almost disingenuous to call this dynamic pricing, when it was really just a bait and switch pricing to a totally new price which virtually all consumers paid.

It was like hopping on a train and finding out immediately after boarding that the train was being switched to peak at a totally new price. Wait, what?! Drawing back to the comparison, this does not happen in travel. Much work has done to bring transparency to the price you see being the price you pay and eradicate “junk fees” and post purchase must’s. When you see a hotel listed for $300 a night, they don’t do a gotcha at checkout and say actually its $700.

Yet, here, we had Ticketmaster doing exactly that. Hey everyone, prices will be £150 (about $200) for standing tickets and £120 for (about $170) for seated tickets. Sweet! Oh, just kidding, we’re actually going to charge £350 (about $475) and we’re only going to tell you after you’ve waited in line for hours.

Concert Pricing Solutions Are Harder To Fix

The nature of travel is that everyone is ready to book at different times, and outside of redeeming points when airline seats or hotel room is released at midnight, there’s rarely a virtual queue to book. It’s rare that there’s a sale so crazy it crashes systems.

With concerts and events it’s the opposite. There’s a very short, very limited window and things often crash. This flip of a switch model creates instant, very limited time demand and necessity to consume. Taking away fair opportunities for those ready to dive in on day one and show their support for artists is duplicitous and terrible.

Ticketmaster has no incentive to stop bots or predatory practices which hamper fan efforts either. When they sell a ticket once to a real fan, they make a ticketing fee once. When they sell to a bot, they get to make a ticketing fee on the sale to a bot, and then again when an actual human buys it off the bots evil controllers.

If you ask me, the best solution would be greater monetization of fan clubs with strong two factor authentication verification. I’d happily pay $25 to join an artists fan club to ensure that I’m joining a queue of real humans who are getting fair access to tickets. There are many benefits…

• The artist can use that upfront revenue to cover production costs and other pieces of their business
• Fans can trust more in the brand of the artist, knowing they’re working together to solve fair access to ticketing. $25 per account would be a barrier even to bots.
• Greater first person fan data would enable better predictions on the amount of tickets in each geographic location

One thing is for sure, it’s not dynamic pricing if everyone who buys, pays the same inflated price, which was not the advertised price — and was never realistically available.

Dynamic pricing should not be applied to first day ticket sales for hot events. Instead, concert promoters should set prices and stick to them. What they do on subsequent days is up for debate. It kind of makes travel feel a bit more reasonable, doesn’t it?