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Ed Sheeran helps 10,000 fans seek refunds from Viagogo

By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 27 June 2018

Ed Sheeran’s tour promoter Kilimanjaro Live says that it helped around 10,000 fans seek refunds from Viagogo at the musician’s recent UK dates.

Sheeran and his team, of course, went to great lengths on this tour to try to stop fans from paying marked up prices for tickets on secondary ticketing sites. That included a commitment to cancel any tickets they knew to have been touted.

So strong was that commitment, most secondary sites agreed not to list tickets for his shows. Although, obviously, pesky Viagogo refused to comply. Which meant lots of tickets were sold via the platform, most of which Team Sheeran spotted and cancelled.

However, keen not to have too many upset fans being turned away at the door, Kilimanjaro had a system in place whereby people showing up with cancelled touted tickets were sold replacements at face value. They were also given a letter stating that their touted ticket had been rejected. That should enable them to get a full refund from Viagogo, which promises a “100% guarantee” to refund monies if tickets don’t get a buyer into a show.

Sheeran wasn’t the first artist to implement this kind of anti-touting policy, although it’s probably not been done at quite this scale before. At Wembley Stadium there were six ‘Victim Of Viagogo’ box office windows dealing with cancelled tickets. And during Sheeran’s four night run in Cardiff, Kilimanjaro boss Stuart Galbraith tells the BBC that his team processed queries from nearly 2000 Viagogo customers, some of whom had paid thousands of pounds to touts through the site.

While Viagogo has not commented on the Sheeran tour specifically, its website states that it believes the practice of promoters cancelling resold tickets to be “highly unfair … unenforceable, and illegal”. Although the UK’s Consumer Rights Act is pretty clear that a touted ticket can be cancelled providing “a term of the original contract for the sale of the ticket provided for its cancellation if it was offered for resale by that buyer”.