For as long as Wightbay has been around, the buying and selling of Isle of Wight Festival tickets on there has been a regular event.
Today that has been brought to an abrupt halt.
Lots in the past
Many an Islander regales tales of huge amount of money that they’ve made buying tickets early and then making a killing in the weeks before the Festival, selling them to those desperate to go.
This year, that demand for tickets appears to have dropped away, with Festival tickets selling through official channels for less than half price just the week before this year’s event.
Banned on Wightbay
The unexpected news from today is that WightBay have banned the sale of Isle of Wight Festival tickets, adding a message
Unfortunatley Wightbay are unable to accept adverts for IOW Festival tickets, due to the Terms and Conditions of the tickets.
Any ads placed for sale or wanted, will be taken down.
Wightbay say …
We contacted Wightbay asking, “When did [IW Festival] contact you asking you to do this? We don’t recall this happening before, has it?” They replied with the following:-
It is very difficult for our staff to ensure that tickets to any events are sold at no more than face value, and prevent fraudulent ticket sellers.
These scams are very common on the Internet as you can appreciate, and to a high profile event such as the Isle of Wight festival even more so.
We made the decision not to allow sales of these tickets via our website, due partly to previous years experience with the high number of fraudulent adverts for tickets, and partly due to the Terms and Conditions of the tickets which can be found here.
Terms 2 and 4 specifically state that tickets are not to be transferred at all to any third party.
In previous years we have attempted to prevent sales of these tickets via our site, but this year we have also removed wanted ads, as these can attract the ticket touts.
How many tickets have actually been sold?
Rumours of low ticket sales have been doing the rounds on the Social networks.
Earlier today we asked IW Festival for the official number of ticket sales this year. As spokesperson replied:-
We don’t confirm numbers of sold tickets, we are expecting up to 50,000 at the Festival.
When prompted (twice), they wouldn’t clarify how many of these tickets have been sold, and how many were issued to those working or volunteering at the Festival, or indeed a more accurate number than an ‘up to’ figure.
