America's Fix The Tix Coalition, which is campaigning for new regulation of the US ticketing market - and especially secondary ticketing - has welcomed the passing of the TICKET Act by the Senate Commerce Committee last week.
Proposed by Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell, the TICKET Act is one of various sets of proposals in US Congress at the moment that seeks to introduce new rules around the sale of tickets. It is mainly concerned with forcing all ticketing platforms in the US - both primary and secondary - to adopt all-in-pricing, where any fees and commissions are declared upfront, not added at the final stage of a ticket purchase.
That is one of ten changes to the ticketing market that the Fix The Tix Coalition called for in a manifesto it published last month.
And on Friday it said in a statement: “The Fix The Tix coalition applauds Chair Maria Cantwell and ranking member Ted Cruz for making ticketing issues a part of the Senate Commerce Committee’s agenda. The Committee’s substitute amendment of the TICKET Act passed out of committee advances all-in pricing, one tenet of the ten point Fix The Tix plan for comprehensive ticketing reform".
The original version of the TICKET Act also included some transparency obligations around so called speculative selling, where ticket touts put tickets on sale that they haven't actually secured yet. That was removed from the act before being passed by the committee, which has been criticised by some campaigners. Though Cantwell acknowledged more work needs to be done around speculative selling.
Fix The Tix want speculative selling of tickets on the resale sites to be banned outright, like it is already in the UK. And while presumably also disappointed that that extra transparency obligation was removed from the TICKET Act, the coalition noted Cantwell's comments, and said that it sees this act as a step in the right direction as it continues to campaign for all the other measures in its manifesto.
The coalition's statement added that its members look forward to working further with supportive Congress members "on a broad array of critical reforms in the Fix The Tix plan that must be enacted by Congress to protect consumers from predatory ticketing practices. These measures include a total ban on speculative tickets, which are fake tickets, and extensive efforts to prevent price gouging of consumers on the secondary ticketing market".