Town are set to introduce a new ticket touting policy to address the reselling of tickets which has become a major issue in the opening weeks of the season.
With tickets difficult to get hold of both for games both home and away, fans with higher priority have been purchasing seats and then selling them on illicitly before other supporters with a lower priority are able to legitimately secure their tickets.
In some cases this has been done in order to gain points on the new Super Blues membership system in order to stand a greater chance of gaining seats for higher demand matches, such as the derby at Norwich City.
unauthorised reselling of tickets to football matches is illegal even at face value, while the club is looking at ways of redistributing season tickets through official channels if fans are unable to make particular games, a service a number of other clubs already offer.
“We’ve had waves of contacts from numerous fans very frustrated around the issue [of ticket reselling],” CEO Mark Ashton said at this evening’s Fans’ Forum.
“We’ve had contacts from the relevant authorities and now we’ve had several contacts from the police on regards to this and particularly what is unfortunately classed as touting.
“It is something that we now have to take extremely seriously and we’re at a point where we have to deal with it seriously. There has been a lot of internal discussion on it.”
Chief operating officer Luke Werhun added: “On the reselling aspect and ticket touting, we have developed a ticket touting policy that will be coming out over the next week and with that there will be sanctions if people are caught selling tickets through unofficial channels.
“Regarding [the questioner’s] point on fans reselling season tickets, we are looking at a handful of providers that provide that service for us where, if you can’t make a game, someone else will be able to purchase that ticket or you could donate it to the Ipswich Town Foundation or whatever. We are looking at that solution, so watch this space on that one.
“But to Mark’s wider point on ticket touting, we are looking at that very seriously because that is right now something that is not fair for other people that are waiting in the queue, waiting for their sales window to open and they can see other people who are able to get tickets when they shouldn’t necessarily be able to.”
Ashton continued: “It’s probably the biggest thing that’s filling my inbox at the moment, the biggest topic. When we start getting contact from the police and the relevant authorities and that number of fans who are concerned about this, we have to act.
“But we wanted to do was take our time, do this properly. As you can imagine, we’ve been in a transfer window, so we’ve been slightly busy. But we will deal with it properly and a policy will come out and we’ll deal with it accordingly.”
