Worldticketshop
Worldticketshop describes itself as a private company that buys and sells tickets to all major music and sports events worldwide: from Celine Dion to Bruce Springsteen, from football to Formula 1. The company was founded by Sebastian Monteban in 2006 with several students at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and grew from three to 35 staff in a few short years. Monteban is also the founder and CEO of affiliation website Cleafs.com and eCommerce site Sunnywatches.com.
Currently, worldticketshop operates as a broker - buying and selling tickets but is moving to a Marketplace platform in late 2009 in order to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers rather than participate in the exchange as a reseller. At the same time, worldticketshop will be launching and relaunching 7 sites in total - worldticketshop.com, worldticketshop.de, worldticketshop.fr, worldticketshop.it, worldticketshop.es, worldticketshop.nl and worldticketshop.ru.
Worldticketshop currently has a buyer protection program that guarantees tickets and has a refund policy of 120 percent - if terms and conditions are met.
Worldticketshop claims to have a network of brokers and contacts in the secondary industry across Europe and offers hard-to-get tickets for all types of events around the continent. Worldticketshop is a bootstrap operation and is self funding growth.
Founder and Investors
Worldticketshop was founded by Sebastian Monteban, in 2006.
Board appointments
Worldticketshop recently appointed Dutch Canadian executive Richard Kastelein, CTO of Sparkling Media and Advisory Board member of Zephyr Financial Technologies, as Chief Strategy Officer (CSO). Harvey Chow, CEO of HCdesigns, Browsersafe and Mailtemple was also recently elevated to Chief Technology Officer. More board level announcements are expected soon.
Official partnerships
Worldticketshop.com has official partnerships with Cleafs.com, Stopover.nl as well as hundreds of brokers around continental Europe.
Emergence of the European Secondary Ticket Market
According the the Telegraph in the UK, The secondary-ticket market is currently estimated to be worth AbOUT £1bn in the UK and up to £5bn across Europe. Fidelity to invest in secondary-ticket market, 13 February 2008. The European market, though a few steps behind the USA, is evolving rapidly and the main players in the Secondary Ticket Market include Seatwave, Viagogo, Getmein and Worldticketshop. Seatwave raised $8m in 2007 and $25M in 2008, Viagogo has raised $70 million to date including $15 million in common stock financing raised in February from tennis greats Andre Agassi and Stefanie Graf — in addition to Index Ventures and lastminute.com. It raised $30 million upon its U.S. launch in 2007. Getmein was acquired by Ticketmaster for an unreleased figure in 2008. Worldticketshop is bootstrapping and has self financed its rapid growth.
The European Secondary Ticket Market
In the Netherlands Socialist Party Member of Parliament Arda Gerkens - has been working on anti-Secondary Ticket legislation since 2007. The central thesis of the bill is that the resale of tickets at a profit must simply be prohibited. In the case of someone not being able to attend they would be allowed to markup the ticket a maximum of ten percent in the market. Industry buzz has the legislation doomed by some - with the current economic crisis not jiving well with possibly driving hundreds of jobs out of the country. But others are worried about the current political makeup of the parliament and the shifting alliances in the minority government.
In early 2009, Dutch State Secretary Frank Heemskerk (Economic Affairs) with the Belgian Minister of Enterprise and Simplification Vincent Van Quickenborne to combat fraud in the Secondary Ticket Industry by merging intelligence from consumer authorities of both countries who will then take action against unfair trade practices.
European Primary and Secondary Markets
Current problems between primary and secondary market markets vary in each country. For instance in Holland, Live Nation, recently known as Mojo, has always had a combative relationship with secondary market brokers and often blocks tickets. They went as far as to cheer-lead the anti-secondary ticketing industry officially proposed by the Dutch Socialist Party in 2008.
Ticketmaster, generally in Europe, has not participated in much antagonism towards the secondary market, but then again, they are quite active in the secondary market itself with their own acquisitions of GetMeIn and TicketsNow. They can hardly go on a blocking spree such as other parties have done – as the hypocrisy would be a little too obvious.
Ticket blocking in Europe
The KNVB (Dutch Football Association) have recently blocked tickets in the secondary market for a match between Scotland and Holland. The blocking affected secondary ticket companies both in the Netherlands and Scotland.
And it was not only secondary ticket industry players that were affected in the KNVB debacle... one corporate hospitality company in the Netherlands offering full package corporate events which included tickets to the Scotland-Netherlands match also got caught in the maelstrom and found themselves with a slew of very unhappy clients with booked hotels, catered food and no tickets to the event because they were blocked. They got caught in the storm intended to ‘eradicate’ what the Dutch media calls, the ‘Black Market’.
Action was taken to the courts by Worldticketshop to unblock the tickets just prior to the event, but the KNVB won the case, based on the KNVB terms and conditions (does not allow commercial reselling of the tickets) – which were declared valid because the KNVB did a media campaign prior and announced the blockage.