For a while I have read that LiveNation / Ticketmaster has a fan guarantee – at participating venues, you can change your mind within 72 hours of your purchase and get a full refund. Or, if you happen to find better seats you can exchange as well (supposedly this works up until the week before the show!) I had never tried it before but recently found myself in a situation where I decided to try it out.
I was trying to get Little Mix tickets through the Facebook presale – and ended up losing 1st row because the site glitched on the last part of the order screen (I was so mad!) and when I saw I had 5th row on my phone on the app, I tried to get those instead. Except the app ended up glitching as well and I had nothing. I ended up buying 12th row – then figured out I could get VIP in the first 10 rows for twice as much (including meeting Little Mix) OR soundcheck VIP for just $25 more in essentially the same area I just bought. I debated calling to cancel (buyers remorse for sure!) but figured I’d see what happened in the pre-sale the next morning instead.
Imagine my surprise when the 5th row ticket I had lost on the app the day before popped back up! I snatched it up without hesitation – though kept looking to see if that front row ticket would show up again. It didn’t. I debated listing the extra ticket on StubHub – but ultimately decided to easiest thing to do would be cancel the order through the guarantee and not have to worry about not being able to sell it. But always had StubHub as backup just in case.
I called the number on Ticketmaster’s “Contact Us” page and needed to let them know the order number (for the order I wanted to cancel), address and last 4 digits of the credit card used to purchase the ticket. The plus side to calling Ticketmaster is their hold music is pretty good – Jack Johnson and Carrie Underwood were among the snippets of songs I got to listen to while I was on hold for approximately 13 minutes. (Estimate was 15!) When I first said I was looking to cancel one order because I had found a better ticket I was told “We have a strict no refund or exchange policy” Oh, Really? I asked “What about the fan guarantee?” and was told they’d have to check to see if it was a participating venue. Back on hold I went!
When she came back she said she could cancel it no problem and a full refund would be back in my account in 7-10 days. Pretty easy – the worst part was the hold time. (It’s too bad that you can’t do the cancellation through the website, but I guess that would make it *too* easy.)
A list of participating venues can be found here (Be sure to double check this list before you’re buying tickets to make sure all the same venues are still participating!)
*I had been moving this post to accommodate for more ‘timely’ posts several times. Turns out, Little Mix canceled the tour so I would have been refunded for both orders either way!*