Hurray! Intents Festival 2017 fights the black ticket market

By Laurens van Beers 13 January 2017

Last Thursday was the start of the Intents Festival 2017 ticket sales. Many fans marked this day in their calendars, because this was their opportunity to obtain a ticket for the Saturday or/and Sunday. Tickets sold-out in no-time during previous editions, so it was no surprise that the hype for the 2017 edition started early. And for a good reason, because when the sales started at 20:00 all Saturday tickets were completely sold-out within 20 minutes. Another great milestone for the organization.

But, as expected, right after the official sold-out message lots of people began selling their tickets for an insane amount of money on Facebook and marktplaats (A Dutch market place website). “I accidentally bought too many tickets” and “Decided not to go after all” were some of the excuses from the scammers, which offered their tickets for more than double the selling price. Of course this immediately caused for a lot of angry people who weren’t lucky enough to claim a ticket.

Now it’s not the first time something like this has happened. To be honest, it basically happens with any event nowadays. But still Intents Festival 2017 decided to do something about it. That’s when a message appeared on Facebook group Raw Style United. Somebody had, in their own words, made a joke where he told people he was selling his tickets for more than double the selling price and now Intents had cancelled his tickets. “I apologize again. My tickets have been declared invalid.”

This led to a massive amount of comments from people saying that it’s his own fault, if it really was a joke to begin with. He certainly wasn’t the only one, because the organization worked hard to cancel a lot of tickets from sellers which asked ridiculous prices after that. “Karmaaaa”, “Great!” and “Such a class act from the organization” was the response from the visitors.

The organization behind Intents Festival 2017 stated that they’ve collaborated with TicketSwap. This website allows people to ask for a ‘fair’ ticket price, not more than 20% above the original price, and all buyers receive a completely new ticket with a new barcode (the old one expires, of course). This way it’s not possible to sell a ticket more than once, which will result in fewer disappointed visitors at the gates of the festival.