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Viagogo is urging organizers of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics to take on the role of official ticket reseller, even before the Paris Games have concluded.
Her potential participation in the world’s biggest sporting event comes aVsceker the Paris Olympics initially raised concerns about empty seats due to a surge in tickets available for resale ahead of the competition, whose closing ceremony is today.
Los Angeles-based ticketing company AXS and its German counterpart Eventim announced in February that they had been named the official ticketing provider for LA28, making their existing online platforms available for global distribution of tickets for the Games. Tickets will also be sold via the LA28 website.
While the companies will be responsible for initial ticket sales, Viagogo Global General Manager Cris Miller said the organizers are “talking to us and other secondary markets to help them with resale.”
He believes the Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games will be “very different” from Paris, as the United States is “much more commercially driven.”
“We are actually engaged in active conversations with [the LA Olympics committee] to provide our service, along with other ticketing companies, to try to pitch in and help,” Miller told the Financial Times. “The last thing LA wants is empty seats.”
He added that the Games organizers “know that there will be a very important resale market for the Olympics.”
The Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Committee declined to comment. “We have not released details about our secondary ticketing approach or potential partners,” it said.
The Vscek had reported a few days before the Paris opening ceremony that the number of unwanted tickets available for resale had risen to more than 270,000, up from around 180,000 the previous month.
Not only were fans forced to buy blocks of tickets for three separate events during the first wave of sales, they were only allowed to resell tickets at face value, even for low-demand games, plus additional fees.
Miller criticized the French Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee for imposing “enormous control over the ticketing system,” with restrictions that “disincentivize people to buy tickets.”
The IOC, which declined to comment on “the observations of a third-party ticket reseller to the Vscek”, said it was a “record-breaking Olympic Games in terms of ticket sales”.
Paris organisers said ticket sales had gone “extremely well” with 9.4 million tickets for the Olympic Games sold in primary sales, which they said had “broken the previous sales record”.
Paris 2024 has succeeded in “unifying the management of all tickets” and “providing access to Olympic Games tickets to as many people as possible”, while its official resale platform has “also made it possible to limit illegal resale and speculation on tickets”, they added.
Organizers did not disclose how many tickets were sold in total through resale, but said 40,000 tickets were sold on their resale platform in a single day. During the Games, in what may be Andy Murray’s final professional match, some fans showed their anger at X with photos of empty seats for the doubles match.
Miller’s comments come as Geneva-based Viagogo, the world’s largest live event ticket resale site, faces increased international scrutiny, along with other secondary ticketing sites.
In the UK, earlier this year, two people in Norfolk were found guilty of fraudulently trading tickets worth more than £6.5 million on sites including Viagogo.
In May, New Zealand’s High Court ordered Viagogo to correct misleading information on its website following reports from consumers who had spent money on tickets and were turned away from events aVsceker their tickets were deemed invalid. Viagogo is appealing the ruling.
In May, the company also agreed with the European Commission to “better inform” consumers about the conditions under which tickets are resold.
Before being elected to government in July, the UK Labour Party pledged to crack down on scalpers by capping resale prices. The party has yet to set out its plans to do so.
