5 ms·

I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve

by oehpr 2y ago

I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions. But I mean, obviously, any kind of system like this strikes me as the same sort of thing as DRM. That you can somehow protect the message from the person you're sharing the message to. How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser? It just seemes ridiculous on its face.

jrockway 2y ago
Yup exactly. Some events are pretty bad at opening the doors early. The Brooklyn Nets seem to open 30 minutes before the game, so they need to get 20,000 people through 20 metal detectors in 30 minutes. Every second extra they add to the process is a second you don't have to buy a $25 drink, and that's how they make their money. We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  >We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares. Sorry, what? Surely business travelers pay more just by virtue of traveling by business class? Or, if travel through business portals was consistently significantly more expensive than just buying the ticket directly on the airline's website, businesses would just start buying tickets directly from the airline's website? Is there something about how ticket fares are calculated and paid that I don't understand?
  - qazxcvbnmlp 2y ago
    Business travelers != travelers in business class. Airlines use a fair number of techniques to price discriminate between leisure and business passengers.
  - drewg123 2y ago
    Last minute / next day fares have traditionally been far more expensive than 3 week advance, and that was intended to impact business travel more than leisure. If there was a 3rd party marketplace for airline tickets, last minute tickets would not be nearly as expensive and the airlines would make far less money. Consider an example where we have a business traveler "Bob" and a leisure traveler "Larry". Bob needs to get to LAX tomorrow to put out a fire at a client site. Larry has a trip booked to LAX tomorrow, but can't go because he's sick. Larry has paid $500 for the trip 3 weeks ago. Today: Larry cancels his trip, and maybe, if he's lucky, gets an airline credit for the original price of the trip that expires in a year and which may be hard to use for his next trip. When he cancels, a seat opens up on the plane, and the airline sells it to Bob for $1200. If resale was permitted: Larry auctions off his ticket at an airline ticket reseller. He gets $700 from Bob. So if resale was permitted, Bob's business saves $500, and Larry makes $200, and the airline looses $1200-$1700. You can see why they hate resale.
    - yellowapple 2y ago
      Okay, but how many business flights are actually last-minute like that? Whenever I've flown for work reasons the tickets were bought at least a week in advance, and usually 3+ weeks in advance. Likewise, there are plenty of non-business flights booked last-minute like that, too - like, as a personal example, needing to book a same-night flight to help a family member drive cross-country with her kids and personal belongings so she could get out of a dangerous personal situation. All this being to say: if price differentiation between in-advance v. last-minute bookings is actually intended to make business travel cost more than leisure travel, I'm thoroughly skeptical of that intent being fulfilled in practice. Seems more likely that it's simply a matter of things costing more when they're more scarce (as seats on an airplane would become as it gets closer and closer to the departure time), and that just so happens to impact business travelers more than leisure travelers.
      - jirf_dev 2y ago
        I would guess most of your exposure to business travel is within tech or consulting, which rarely require last-minute booking. I would imagine most last-minute bookings for business travel come from people in sales. I’ve seen many sales people find out a prospective client is open to meet and immediately hop on a flight just to potentially make a sale. The opportunity cost is worth it even for small businesses. My exposure to this was for wholesale and retail distribution of consumer electronics but I’d imagine that this would apply to any business with a sales team.
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    Yeah, I don't think that's right either. They don't check your ID at the gate, it's just TSA that checks your id (if you have one).
    - donalhunt 2y ago
      Depends on the departure and arrival city. It is common for ID to be checked at the gate for international flights because airlines are held responsible for transporting passengers that don't have the correct paperwork / visitor permits for the destination country.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      Yes, and the airlines don't (generally) let you change the name on a ticket.
    - devilbunny 2y ago
      And they require a boarding pass. Which can’t be changed without the airline’s permission. Back in the old days, sales like this were common. No ID checks, non-passengers allowed through security, and the classified ads in newspapers would say “round-trip coach ticket May 8-12 JFK to SFO, male name, call 212-555-1234”. So you met them, got your paper ticket, got a boarding pass at the counter or the gate, and flew.
- yellowapple 2y ago
  > or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares. Don't they already do that anyway? Every time I've gotten on a plane for work purposes, there was no differentiation between "business traveler" v. "leisure traveler" as far as the ticket purchasing process was concerned. Hell, in the most recent case it was even with my own credit card (for which I submitted an expense report to be reimbursed) - so for all the airline knew, I was just taking a week-long vacation to Colorado Springs (in that case) instead of being there for work.
  - jrockway 2y ago
    The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night. Business travelers go home on Friday night. (SFO-NYC on Friday night was always a tough flight to book. I usually stayed the extra night so I could fly 1st or Business for less money.) If you could buy someone else's ticket on the secondary market, then you could do a split ticket thing where you both stay Saturday night but neither of you actually do. Everyone should change their name to Pat Smith and end this scam once and for all.
    - vdqtp3 2y ago
      > The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night. I recently flew from the US to Europe and returning on Thursday or Friday was twice the price of flying home on Saturday or Sunday - the weekend return options actually showed up as free during booking.
cogman10 2y ago
So even if you don't want to do the ID thing, there are alternatives that you see all over the place (like venmo) Have a rotating QR code seeded with a unique to the user id. Then with ticket master, require a login to buy tickets. Register the tickets to the ID and then do the lookup with a combination of the ticket id, rotating qr code, and the user id. That requires the admitter device to send the challenge back to HQ, but that shouldn't really be much of a challenge. Tickets then become linked to the user's account (perhaps you allow transfer). This is effectively what Disney does with their ticketing system, along with at the gate them taking a picture of you so they can confirm "Yes, so and so looks like the photo". But yeah, all of this is ridiculous on its face as the cheaper and easier solution is ticket plus ID. If you are worried about flow have signs up before check in that say "be sure to have your ID ready before you get to the counter". The ticketmaster solutions are just bad/half assed. That is to say, if ticketmater had just done TOPS like the article points out, you'd not need the headache they've created with needing a live internet connection to load your ticket.
- monksy 2y ago
  Disney is collecting pictures of everyone faces. That's pretty creepy.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
    They only collected my fingerprint last time I went.
    - hiatus 2y ago
      Are there no cameras in the fingerprint collection area?
      - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
        I don't recall. There's probably cameras everywhere. Disney is hardcore.
- 2y ago
carlosjobim 2y ago
> How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser? A ticket scalper cannot know the names of the people that will later purchase his tickets. So connecting each ticket to a name prevents scalpers.
crote 2y ago
> Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions. But they in turn greatly degraded the flow of traffic by forcing the use of a proprietary always-online app which fails to load when your cellular connection is less-than-ideal. Verifying a photo ID would probably be faster.
- oehpr 2y ago
  True, but when you point out practical realities like this to monopolistic institutions, they don't have to care. They will instead ask "well why isn't the connection good at the concert? What can we do to fix that?" (ie. "we don't have to change when we can make you change") It IS true that if you don't have to verify the ID of the ticket holder then admissions will go much faster. So long as they can make that plausible sales pitch, they can use it as justification for whatever byzantine DRM system they can dream up.

by oehpr 2y ago

jrockway 2y ago

Yup exactly. Some events are pretty bad at opening the doors early. The Brooklyn Nets seem to open 30 minutes before the game, so they need to get 20,000 people through 20 metal detectors in 30 minutes. Every second extra they add to the process is a second you don't have to buy a $25 drink, and that's how they make their money. We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
BobaFloutist 2y ago
>We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares. Sorry, what? Surely business travelers pay more just by virtue of traveling by business class? Or, if travel through business portals was consistently significantly more expensive than just buying the ticket directly on the airline's website, businesses would just start buying tickets directly from the airline's website? Is there something about how ticket fares are calculated and paid that I don't understand?
- qazxcvbnmlp 2y ago
  Business travelers != travelers in business class. Airlines use a fair number of techniques to price discriminate between leisure and business passengers.
- drewg123 2y ago
  Last minute / next day fares have traditionally been far more expensive than 3 week advance, and that was intended to impact business travel more than leisure. If there was a 3rd party marketplace for airline tickets, last minute tickets would not be nearly as expensive and the airlines would make far less money. Consider an example where we have a business traveler "Bob" and a leisure traveler "Larry". Bob needs to get to LAX tomorrow to put out a fire at a client site. Larry has a trip booked to LAX tomorrow, but can't go because he's sick. Larry has paid $500 for the trip 3 weeks ago. Today: Larry cancels his trip, and maybe, if he's lucky, gets an airline credit for the original price of the trip that expires in a year and which may be hard to use for his next trip. When he cancels, a seat opens up on the plane, and the airline sells it to Bob for $1200. If resale was permitted: Larry auctions off his ticket at an airline ticket reseller. He gets $700 from Bob. So if resale was permitted, Bob's business saves $500, and Larry makes $200, and the airline looses $1200-$1700. You can see why they hate resale.
  - yellowapple 2y ago
    Okay, but how many business flights are actually last-minute like that? Whenever I've flown for work reasons the tickets were bought at least a week in advance, and usually 3+ weeks in advance. Likewise, there are plenty of non-business flights booked last-minute like that, too - like, as a personal example, needing to book a same-night flight to help a family member drive cross-country with her kids and personal belongings so she could get out of a dangerous personal situation. All this being to say: if price differentiation between in-advance v. last-minute bookings is actually intended to make business travel cost more than leisure travel, I'm thoroughly skeptical of that intent being fulfilled in practice. Seems more likely that it's simply a matter of things costing more when they're more scarce (as seats on an airplane would become as it gets closer and closer to the departure time), and that just so happens to impact business travelers more than leisure travelers.
    - jirf_dev 2y ago
      I would guess most of your exposure to business travel is within tech or consulting, which rarely require last-minute booking. I would imagine most last-minute bookings for business travel come from people in sales. I’ve seen many sales people find out a prospective client is open to meet and immediately hop on a flight just to potentially make a sale. The opportunity cost is worth it even for small businesses. My exposure to this was for wholesale and retail distribution of consumer electronics but I’d imagine that this would apply to any business with a sales team.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Yeah, I don't think that's right either. They don't check your ID at the gate, it's just TSA that checks your id (if you have one).
  - donalhunt 2y ago
    Depends on the departure and arrival city. It is common for ID to be checked at the gate for international flights because airlines are held responsible for transporting passengers that don't have the correct paperwork / visitor permits for the destination country.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Yes, and the airlines don't (generally) let you change the name on a ticket.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    And they require a boarding pass. Which can’t be changed without the airline’s permission. Back in the old days, sales like this were common. No ID checks, non-passengers allowed through security, and the classified ads in newspapers would say “round-trip coach ticket May 8-12 JFK to SFO, male name, call 212-555-1234”. So you met them, got your paper ticket, got a boarding pass at the counter or the gate, and flew.
yellowapple 2y ago
> or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares. Don't they already do that anyway? Every time I've gotten on a plane for work purposes, there was no differentiation between "business traveler" v. "leisure traveler" as far as the ticket purchasing process was concerned. Hell, in the most recent case it was even with my own credit card (for which I submitted an expense report to be reimbursed) - so for all the airline knew, I was just taking a week-long vacation to Colorado Springs (in that case) instead of being there for work.
- jrockway 2y ago
  The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night. Business travelers go home on Friday night. (SFO-NYC on Friday night was always a tough flight to book. I usually stayed the extra night so I could fly 1st or Business for less money.) If you could buy someone else's ticket on the secondary market, then you could do a split ticket thing where you both stay Saturday night but neither of you actually do. Everyone should change their name to Pat Smith and end this scam once and for all.
  - vdqtp3 2y ago
    > The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night. I recently flew from the US to Europe and returning on Thursday or Friday was twice the price of flying home on Saturday or Sunday - the weekend return options actually showed up as free during booking.

cogman10 2y ago

So even if you don't want to do the ID thing, there are alternatives that you see all over the place (like venmo) Have a rotating QR code seeded with a unique to the user id. Then with ticket master, require a login to buy tickets. Register the tickets to the ID and then do the lookup with a combination of the ticket id, rotating qr code, and the user id. That requires the admitter device to send the challenge back to HQ, but that shouldn't really be much of a challenge. Tickets then become linked to the user's account (perhaps you allow transfer). This is effectively what Disney does with their ticketing system, along with at the gate them taking a picture of you so they can confirm "Yes, so and so looks like the photo". But yeah, all of this is ridiculous on its face as the cheaper and easier solution is ticket plus ID. If you are worried about flow have signs up before check in that say "be sure to have your ID ready before you get to the counter". The ticketmaster solutions are just bad/half assed. That is to say, if ticketmater had just done TOPS like the article points out, you'd not need the headache they've created with needing a live internet connection to load your ticket.

monksy 2y ago
Disney is collecting pictures of everyone faces. That's pretty creepy.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  They only collected my fingerprint last time I went.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    Are there no cameras in the fingerprint collection area?
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
      I don't recall. There's probably cameras everywhere. Disney is hardcore.
2y ago

carlosjobim 2y ago

> How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser? A ticket scalper cannot know the names of the people that will later purchase his tickets. So connecting each ticket to a name prevents scalpers.

crote 2y ago

> Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions. But they in turn greatly degraded the flow of traffic by forcing the use of a proprietary always-online app which fails to load when your cellular connection is less-than-ideal. Verifying a photo ID would probably be faster.

oehpr 2y ago
True, but when you point out practical realities like this to monopolistic institutions, they don't have to care. They will instead ask "well why isn't the connection good at the concert? What can we do to fix that?" (ie. "we don't have to change when we can make you change") It IS true that if you don't have to verify the ID of the ticket holder then admissions will go much faster. So long as they can make that plausible sales pitch, they can use it as justification for whatever byzantine DRM system they can dream up.