See Tickets- Help Please!

jacobtribe

Hi All,

I need some advice on how to deal with an issue that has come up with See Tickets.

I purchased 5 tickets from them for Sarah Millican Live in the balcony section of Middlesbrough Town Hall. These were the only ones available to purchase from See Tickets, but the view is good there so I didn't mind. We paid for them a year in advance as you do with tickets.

Come show day, we get there early and are shown to the balcony section by the security staff. After around 30 minutes another family come up to us and say they are sitting in our seats and show us the tickets that they had purchased directly from the venue and they had the same tickets like us. They verbally abused us as well, but we will leave that for now. The venue staff then come up to us and everyone else in that section and said that See Tickets had missold their allocation, they only had allocation for the Gallery above and they would be moving us up there. Those seats are not a good view and don't cost as much as the ones we had purchased. We all moved annoyed as the show was about to start.

I have tried for nearly a whole month now to contact See Tickets, they don't have a telephone line, don't respond on social media so email is the only option. I have had nothing from them they haven't sent anything. 

I put in a section 75 with Tesco Bank, my credit card provider, and they said that they wouldn't be paying out the refund as we moved seats and that meant we accepted the change in the contract!

I am absolutely livid with both See Tickets and Tesco Bank. So the situation is now that we ended up moving to a worse part of the venue and want a full refund as we didn't get the tickets we purchased. With See not responding and Tesco not playing ball, what is the next step? I am not letting this go and need some advice.

Many Thanks, 

user1977

I don't see why you'd be entitled to a full refund if you still got seats to see the show.

jacobtribe

Because we purchased tickets else where in the venue and ended up with worse tickets and what we paid for 

Aylesbury_Duck

Objectively, why were they worse?  The performer was a lone comedienne, was a good view really essential to the experience?

At best, seetickets owe you the difference in price between the seats you bought and the ones you ended up in.  You're not entitled to a refund.  You may have been had you left, but you stayed and watched the show.

Sandtree

jacobtribe said:

Because we purchased tickets else where in the venue and ended up with worse tickets and what we paid for 

Which would suggest a partial refund is due.

Your easiest route would be to complain to Tesco and escalate to the financial Ombudsman if you arent happy with Tesco's response or there is no response within 8 weeks. There may however be a challenge on the Debtor - Creditor - Supplier chain given the use of a ticket agent but given Tesco didnt raise it in the first instance you may get away with it.

Alderbank

jacobtribe said:

I...want a full refund as we didn't get the tickets we purchased. 

Many Thanks, 

SEE tickets' T&Cs, which you agreed to, say 'Whilst we allocate specific seats to you we have the right to change these seats to others of equal value' so you accepted that you weren't entitled to the actual tickets you purchased.

You were entitled though to tickets of equal value. You say the Gallery tickets were cheaper than the Balcony ones. What were the two prices for the show you attended?

for reference, prices for the same seat, same night upcoming Jason Mansford show are £32.50 for balcony and £32.50 for Gallery

pinkshoes

jacobtribe said:

Because we purchased tickets else where in the venue and ended up with worse tickets and what we paid for 

In which case you are entitled to the difference in price between the two tickets e.g. if your tickets were £100 each and the ones where you were moved to were priced at £70 each, then you are entitled to claim a refund of £30 x 5 tickets.

You other option was to refuse the alternative offered (as it was NOT of equal value as per the T&C mentioned by @Alderbank ) and seek a full refund. Unfortunately you did not choose this offer and accepted the alternative seats so are not entitled to a FULL refund, only a partial one.