Festival fan and all-round clever-sticks, Ian Winter, from Isle of Wight company HomePage Media, decided he’d like to know how the sale price Isle of Wight Festival tickets alter in the lead up to the event, mainly because he had a friend who wanted a ticket, but also because he likes hacking data. We love people who do stuff like this.
He started tracking final prices of Festival tickets on eBay auctions a couple of weeks ago.
The following is in his own words.
Spot prices
These spot prices are for a wide variety of things, i.e. a few of the outliers may be for more than two tickets, and it mixes in with tickets that may include ferry or accommodation.
That aside, the bulk of them, by far, are for either one or a pair of tickets with no extras. It’s tricky to absolutely separate out the single and pairs, but I think it’s easy to see on the chart how the sales mass into two distinct groups that we can assume to be singles and pairs.
A week out – prices drop
It’s pretty clear that as we get to a week out from the festival, the number of sales on eBay starts to increase (judge by dot density), and there’s a clear shift from above list price to below it (note that almost all of these are for camping tickets, very few non-campers around, so compare against red lines).
But I guess the conclusions are:
- If you want to get a bargain wait until the week before, and then diligently hit eBay. (Unless everybody gets the same idea of course.)
- You will get a much better price-per-ticket if you’re buying a pair.
- If you have a ticket to sell, do it a couple of weeks before the event – even if you do not yet have wristbands in hand.
- And bear in mind that the last-minute desperate buyer is a prime target for eBay scammers, so always look for a description with a ring of truth, a photo of the wrist-bands and ideally a high eBay seller rating.
Data hackers
If you like hacking data, get in touch with VB – we love this stuff.
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