Season-ticket holders command the best seats. But now you have a better shot at buying their seats at events they're not attending by using an online ticket exchange.
Ticketmaster, eBay and StubHub, among others, let season-ticket holders resell their seats to the general public. But be aware: You may end up paying far more than what the tickets originally sold for.
For example, StubHub recently sold a pair of center-court, third-tier tickets to a sold-out NBA playoff game. The tickets cost $115 each — plus $23 in handling fees and $15 for overnight shipping. Equivalent tickets originally sold for $45 each, plus about $16 in handling.
Online ticket exchanges simplify and legitimize ticket resales for both buyers and sellers.
Christopher Toy of ticket reseller OnlineTickets.com says: "Fans hate to feel shady for buying tickets from some guy standing outside a stadium, and they hate to feel they've been gouged. Online trading puts all the information out in the open."
The top sites remind sellers that they are on the honor system to obey their state's resale laws. But those laws, which put caps on how much sellers can mark up a ticket's face value, generally do not apply to season-ticket holders, so there's plenty of opportunity for price inflation.
Here's a guide to the leading sites for resale tickets.
Ticket prices on StubHub; www.stubhub.com, are set by the seller. For its fee, StubHub charges a buyer 10 percent of the price charged by the seller, plus shipping. It currently resells only tickets to sports events but will add concert and Broadway tickets soon.
Among eBay's several so-called storefront categories is "Tickets & Experiences"; www.stores.ebay.com, which holds the largest exclusive supply of tickets for resale. The site's large number of visitors makes it attractive to buyers and sellers who believe that competitive bidding will snare them better deals than fixed-price sales elsewhere.
Sellers pay the standard eBay fee of about $2 to list, plus a transaction fee of up to about 5 percent of the sale.
While it isn't yet a leading site, Ticketmaster's Marketplace, at www.marketplace.ticketmaster.com, soon might be, given the company's 800-pound-gorilla status in the ticket business. The prices at Ticketmaster are fixed by the seller, who receives 90 percent, with the remaining 10 percent going to Ticketmaster and the team. One unique feature: Sellers can e-mail bar-coded tickets to buyers for an extra $4 per ticket.