Britain’s greediest touts sell free Open tickets for £1,500
Feeding frenzy around 150th championship
MONEY-GRABBING touts are targeting golf fans by cynically ramping up ticket prices for next week’s historic 150th Open championship.
Passes which were originally handed out for free to children are now being sold for £1,500.
Meanwhile, a pair of standard tickets for the final day, originally priced at £95 each, are being offered for £3,594.
Golf fans made more than a million applications when tickets were first made available last year for the championship, to be played over the Old Course at St Andrews.
To satisfy demand from all over the world, a ballot was held allowing 290,000 lucky buyers to purchase tickets. These were priced at £20 to £50 on practice days, beginning next Sunday, increasing to £95 on each of the last four days of the event.
Young people aged 16 to 24 were offered halfprice tickets and as part of a Kids Go Free policy spearheaded by the organiser, the R&A, 20,000 under-16s got theirs for nothing. However, as excitement mounts, tickets are being touted at huge mark-ups on auction sites and ‘secondary’ ticketing websites.
Viagogo is offering a child’s ticket for the final day for just under £1,500 – even though they were originally handed out for free and can only be used if the holder is accompanied by a paying adult.
On the StubHub resale site, two ‘general admission’ tickets for the final day are available for £3,594, despite the offer saying ‘face value £95’. The pricing is made up of two times £1,500, plus additional ‘fees’ of £297.
TicketApt is offering fourday ‘bundles’ costing £762 per ticket between July 14 and 17. The offer says they are
‘guaranteed original tickets’. Dozens of tickets are available at various prices on online auction site eBay, with three tickets for the final Sunday pitched at a suggested £1,200.
The eTicketing site offers a Monday to Sunday pass for £1,500, plus a handling fee of £360, making a total of £1,860.
However, the R&A warned last night that buyers of resold tickets may not get in.
A spokesman said: ‘We have stressed to fans that tickets should only be purchased from TheOpen.com or our authorised ticketing providers. Any tickets made available by unofficial operators are done so without our permission.
‘We do not permit reselling of tickets on these websites and may refuse entry to any holders of resold tickets.’
An official R&A resale website allows holders to sell any unwanted tickets at face value, but it is only open to those who took part in last year’s ballot. Even tickets bought through ‘authorised providers’ do not come cheap when they are wrapped up in a ‘ticket and accommodation’ package.
A one-day ticket forms part of a package deal offered by Links Golf St Andrews, which markets itself as ‘an authorised provider’ of St Andrews golf holidays.
Including one night’s stay at Gleneagles Hotel, the package – which is now sold out – costs £2,530.