Quick quiz: Click on this site for Beijing Olympics tickets. Now, click on this ticket site. What’s the difference? The first is official, the second is not. They look pretty much the same, right? That’s the point, and that is what’s scary. The second link is clearly some ticketing warehouse. Note the text along the top of your browser — Champions League? Euro 2008? But, you say, I want Olympics tickets! — and the glaring typo in the welcome message. Go ahead and click on ‘About Us’.
The Washington Post‘s crack travel team outed a sketchy Olympic ticketing site this past weekend in their “Coming and Going” column. Having been alerted by a reader to a suspicious site — http://www.beijingticketing.com — CoGo, as the column is playfully referred to, made some calls. A few things didn’t add up: The site gives a UK phone number and a Phoenix address. The company running the site — XL&H — is either a public or a private enterprise, depending on which part of the site you happen upon. It is registered in Delaware. The Post notes all this, but couldn’t turn up any Delaware registration for the company. When reporters tried to contact the company through the e-mail given on the site, they received a vague response about all tickets being available for pick-up in China. The paper also turns up some interesting fine print items.
What really matters in all this is that, as the Post notes, this particular site pops up first in most standard Google searches for Olympics tickets, which could lead some to see it as more official than it might be. Ditto for the second and third hits that come up on most searches, the Post reports.
The Olympics are a scant five months away. Individual events have been sold out for months, and the scramble is on to secure packages and miracle one-offs. This is not to say that you cannot go through alternative channels to obtain hard-to-get seats, or that Web sites advertising tickets are necessarily scams. But you should be careful and you should have a pretty good idea where you’re sending your money.