alt Hacker News> Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable.
That's not desirable either. You often can't make it to all the games, so they want you to be able to give some tickets to friends, etc.
They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.
So you really do need data to tell the difference -- are a third of the tickets mostly going to the same 5 other friends (OK, desirable), or are 95% of the tickets going to a different random person each time (scalping)?
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But you can do that the same way you do with the app. The does this by tying you ticket to your season pass, and to you. If you want to give the ticket to someone else, call the ticket office, ask them to re-register the ticket to your friend. If the ticket office notices that X number of tickets tied to that season pass has been re-registered, just refuse, or better, have the system refuse.
Fans can pick the easy option with the app, or if they really want, the expensive option where they need to go pick up the re-registered ticket if they want to give them to a friend. You can do this without the app, it's just more work, which isn't much of a hassle, as most won't pick this option and the passes are expensive enough that you can justify the extra handling cost of maybe 5% of the tickets.
They could force you to re-sell your tickets through the team MLB site, and to sell them for face value.
If the tickets come in at less than face value because of the season sale (not unreasonable), that can work OK (particularly for good seats for a team like the Dodgers). Most folks simply won't be able to sell all of the tickets. The goal isn't to make ad hoc ticket sales a necessarily profitable enterprise, the goal is to sell season seats, so you have to be somewhat accommodating. Pretty hard for anyone to go to all 81 homes games.
This can only go so far, unless you make the sold ticket not transferable.
They can also allow some margin to be just outright sold at market. I know several season ticket holders who sell the tickets to the big games (like Dodgers/Yankees) at a premium to help offset the entire season ticket package.
The last time I had a season pass to something, they printed me the equivalent of an employee id badge with my face and name printed on it. The badge was the ticket. How do you resell an individual ticket?
It's pretty common for people who rely on networking to have season passes and hand out various games as "gifts" to whoever they want to get on the good side of.
Nothing about this requires an app. Just an ID.
Forcing the app is almost certainly for tracking purposes and justifying the decision for whatever braindead higher-up decided it was a good idea, therefore it must be made to work.
>They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.
Why do you need a smartphone to do this when a white list checked against ID at the door would suffice? As the other respondent says, you either generate a badge for the passholder, or have an approved list of guests that can use the season pass if the passholder chooses to offer it to others.