The Ticket Resale Industry Has a Trust Crisis It Created Itself
The ticket resale market spent the last decade acting like it was solving a problem for fans.
Not because resale exists. Resale has always existed. If someone cannot attend a concert or a Wimbledon semi-final they should be able to sell their ticket.
What is not normal is seeing a £95 ticket become £137 after fees.
What is not normal is joining an online queue only to find half the inventory already sitting on secondary marketplaces before genuine fans reach checkout.
What is not normal is pretending "service charges" are unavoidable when platforms quietly stack fees on both buyers and sellers while hiding the final cost until the very last step.
Fans started noticing. Then regulators did too.
Last year the backlash around Oasis ticket sales became impossible to ignore. Fans accused platforms and ticketing companies of exploiting demand through inflated pricing and chaotic purchasing systems. The Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal investigation into Ticketmaster's use of dynamic pricing during the Oasis reunion tour, eventually securing undertakings from the company in September 2025 to improve price transparency, including giving fans 24 hours' notice of tiered pricing and ending misleading ticket labels.
In November 2025, the UK government announced it would ban above-face-value ticket resale across music, sport, theatre, comedy and other live events. The rules make it illegal to resell a ticket for more than its original cost plus any unavoidable fees paid during the original purchase. Platforms themselves would become legally responsible for enforcing those rules. The CMA can now impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover on businesses that breach consumer law, under new powers introduced by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.
Government analysis estimates the ban could save fans around £112 million annually, with 900,000 more tickets bought directly from primary sellers each year. The average resale ticket price could fall by £37 once the rules are in force.
Then came the May 2026 King's Speech, which confirmed two further measures: a draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill published for public consultation, and a Sporting Events Bill introduced as primary legislation targeting touting at major sporting events.
That is a significant regulatory shift, but final legislation is still some time away.
The biggest mistake the resale market made was assuming people would tolerate anything as long as the event was desirable enough.
Taylor Swift. Oasis. Wimbledon. Premier League finals. NFL London. Glastonbury.
Fans kept paying because they were emotionally invested.
But eventually the experience became toxic.
Consumers stopped feeling excited. They started feeling manipulated.
A Department for Business and Trade report found that drip pricing was present in 93% of event ticket businesses reviewed — the highest rate of any sector examined. Drip pricing is the practice of advertising a low headline price then adding mandatory charges at the final step of checkout. The CMA called it out directly: "Hitting customers with hidden fees is illegal. It is not fair to draw people in with what looks like a good deal, only for them to find the real price is higher when they reach the checkout."
In June 2026, the CMA fined StubHub UK £889,200 for doing exactly that between April and December 2025. A separate investigation into Viagogo over the same conduct is ongoing.
CMA analysis found that typical mark-ups on secondary market tickets exceed 50%, while Trading Standards investigations uncovered evidence of resale prices reaching up to six times the original cost.
Once trust goes in a marketplace it is incredibly difficult to get back.
They have scale, inventory, and brand recognition.
But none of those things create loyalty automatically anymore.
In fact the strongest growth opportunity in resale right now probably belongs to companies positioning themselves against the old model.
Twickets built a strong reputation around face-value fan-to-fan resale. TicketSwap gained traction by making resale feel cleaner and less exploitative. Newer challengers are now pushing harder still on transparency and lower fees.
Ticket Hunter is one of them. What stands out is not the technology. It is the positioning. The platform is not trying to become the biggest resale marketplace on earth. It is competing as a fairer alternative: lower seller fees, verified listings, transparent pricing shown upfront.
That is a more intelligent place to compete right now.
The market does not need another giant platform optimised around extracting maximum margin from every transaction. It needs platforms fans do not hate using.
This is the part the resale industry still does not fully understand.
Consumers no longer treat fees as background noise. Fees are the experience.
The language consumers use has changed. That tells you the market itself is changing.
The Sporting Events Bill introduced in the May 2026 King's Speech will move faster for major sporting events than for the broader live events sector. Sports fans may see protections arrive before the general Ticket Tout Ban Bill becomes law.
For buyers, the practical effect should be that the price shown at the start is the price paid. For sellers, the legal maximum is now the original face value. For platforms, passive hosting is finished: they become accountable for what their users list.
Platforms that already operate on face-value principles are best placed for this shift. Platforms built around opacity face the most disruption.
Not in a theoretical way. In a practical one.
Fans want price alerts when tickets appear below a threshold. They want better price tracking across platforms. They want smarter inventory discovery and faster comparison without navigating five different checkout flows.
The future winner in resale may not be the company with the largest inventory. It may be the company that helps fans navigate inventory better. That is a completely different kind of competition, and it is one reason newer marketplaces have a genuine opening despite the scale gap between them and the incumbents.
Ticket Hunter has built price alerting and cross-listing visibility into its core product, which matters more as the market becomes price-transparent by law.
Fake QR codes. Duplicate tickets. Fake sellers. Social media scams. Invalid transfers.
Buyers are becoming more cautious. Verified listings are becoming infrastructure, not just a marketing claim.
The House of Commons Library briefing on ticket resales notes that the secondary ticketing sector has faced repeated CMA enforcement action since 2016, with the regulator finding continued non-compliance with consumer law even after formal investigations. That history explains why the government has moved from guidance and undertakings to legislation with real financial penalties attached.
Platforms built around confusing pricing are going to struggle in that environment.
The ticket resale market is not dying. It is being regulated into something closer to what fans were promised it would be.
Regulators are more active than at any point in the sector's history. The CMA fined StubHub within eight months of its new enforcement powers coming into force. The Viagogo investigation is still running. The FEAT coalition in Europe is pushing for similar rules across the EU through the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act.
The old model works in the short term because demand for live events is massive.
Long term, transparency is no longer a differentiator. In a regulated market where all platforms must show all-in prices and cap resale at face value, the platforms that built their business around fee opacity lose their structural advantage.
The platforms that built around trust keep it.
An interesting article, and I agree with its central point: trust has become the defining issue in ticket resale. The challenge, though, is that "resale" is often treated as a single market when it isn't. There is a world of difference between a fan who genuinely cannot attend and wants to recover their costs, and industrial-scale speculative selling designed to exploit scarcity. Sadly, the scalper/tout behaviour that grabs all the headlines. Resale itself is not the enemy. Lack of transparency, industrial scale scalpers, hidden fees, speculative inventory, poor enforcement and weak consumer protection are. The platforms that succeed over the next decade are unlikely to be those that maximise short-term margins. They will be the ones that earn trust by making resale transparent, verifiable and aligned with the interests of fans, event organisers and artists. Technology alone won't solve the problem. Neither will legislation alone. Real progress comes when technology, regulation, enforcement, education and industry collaboration all work together -> happily momentum on all fronts is gathering pace.
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