Looking for tickets? Avoid this online broker

Herb Weisbaum • Profile • E-mail

Mike Harrison of Norwood, N.J., is a big fan of the Allman Brothers Band. He planned to see the Southern rock icons in August at the amphitheater in Bethel, N.Y., site of the 1969 Woodstock concert.

Tickets sold out within minutes, so Harrison went looking online and came across TicketsMyWay.com. The site promises reasonable prices for “quality seating” at all major concert, theater and sporting events.

“They had a couple of great seats, eighth row right in front of Gregg Allman,” he says. “And I thought it would be a great surprise for my girlfriend who has never seen them.”

Harrison bought the tickets for $400 and got a confirmation e-mail with the shipping information. They would be sent about two weeks before the concert. But the shipping date came and went and not a word from the company. So Harrison called. He says no one ever answered and there was no way to leave a message.

The day of the concert Harrison received an e-mail that said, “We are unable to fulfill your order.” Frustrated and disappointed, he went online to see if he could find out more about TicketsMyWay. “There were dozens and dozens of postings about this company ripping people off,” he says. “From what I could find out just by poking around on the Internet, they’ve been operating like this for a long, long time.”

TicketsMyWay.com promises “outstanding customer service,” but during the last three years, the Better Business Bureau has received 265 complaints about the company.

The BBB’s Steve Cox tells me there are three main problems. “People are not receiving their tickets, they’re receiving their tickets too late, or the seats they wanted are not the seats they got.” Cox says the company rarely responds to unhappy customers.

Buying tickets online There are many reputable online ticket brokers. You just have to make sure you use one of them. Look for the BBBOnLine seal. It means the company has a good reputation and a secure Web site for processing payments. Pay with a credit card or through PayPal. This provides fraud protection and the potential for reimbursement if the company is uncooperative. Never pay with a cashier’s check or wire money to a seller. Don’t use a debit card. It’s not a smart way to pay for online transactions, especially with an unknown company.

Because of the volume of complaints and the lack of response to them, the BBB gives TicketsMyWay.com an "unsatisfactory" rating. The bureau went public last week, warning online ticket buyers “they might get burned” if they shop at this site.

TicketsMyWay.com is run by a Las Vegas company, Events Marketing, LLC. It isn’t easy to reach them. Their site does not give an e-mail address and when I called (during normal business hours) no one answered the phone and there was no option for leaving a message. So I sent a fax and got a call from service representative Andrew Sims.

Sims says it’s “pretty unfair” for the Better Business Bureau to give his company an unsatisfactory rating. He blames most of the complaints on canceled shows and delivery problems. And he says if someone doesn’t receive their order they get a refund or tickets from another company.

Sims claims more than 90 percent of the complaints filed with the BBB have already been resolved. The bureau’s reliability report tells a different story. It shows that in 194 of the 256 cases, the company did not respond to the BBB or to the consumer to resolve the issues.

Earlier this year, Jeanne Schmitz of Chicago shopped at TicketsMyWay.com and had what she describes as a “nightmare experience.”

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