Glastonbury takes on ticket touts

The organisers of the Glastonbury Festival have introduced new online ticket-management measures in the battle against ticket touts.

Tickets for the summer music festival sell out quickly, with many turning up for sale online at much higher prices. The new system requires all to-be-festival goers to register online or by post starting today in order to buy tickets when they are released in April. Only registered users will be allowed to purchase tickets - and then only one apiece.

When registering, festival fans must upload a passport sized photo, which will be printed out on the ticket for added security.

Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis told the BBC: "It's a much fairer system. It means unscrupulous people won't be able to sell their tickets on for a profit.

"The people who buy the tickets on 1 April will be the people who are actually coming to the festival."

Previous big-ticket events have used anti-copying techniques, such as holographs, said Clive Longbottom, service director for business processes facilitation at research firm Quocirca. "They'd make it like a £20 note, so it was hard to copy," he explained.

These measures are more about preventing touts and creating a level playing-field for ticket buyers, he said, but there are some downsides.

"All of the block bookings can't happen, so it may affect tickets going to companies for hospitality reasons," Longbottom said.

As well as impacting corporate sales, people who don't get lucky on the first round of sales will be left with no way to get into the festival, whether they have the money for scalped tickets or not.

More advanced ticketing systems will raise costs, he added, saying retailers will have to swallow the higher costs or pass them on to consumers. "They will have to look at how it will affect ticket sales," Longbottom said. "A £10 increase on an already expensive Glastonbury ticket is no big deal. But something at the £50-60 level, it's more significant."

But the security measures offer a better trail and offer more a more controlled process, he said, which may help avoid difficulties face by Cricket Australia earlier this year, when they cancelled thousands of apparently scalped tickets.

"I'd rather know that the ticket was real," Longbottom said. "But people will try their best to get around it."

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