In 2010, the Americans with Disabilities Act received updates to bring the Act into the Digital Age.
One of these updates is concert ticketing. Recently, I attended a concert with my mom. Wonderful experience, 11/10 would do it again but maybe not on the coldest night of the year in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Fiserv Forum is new, universally designed, and beautiful.
The updated 2010 ADA law covers ticket sales and prices, what constitutes as “accessible seating”, the secondary ticket market, holding and releasing tickets for seating and fraud prevention when purchasing accessible tickets. That last part is a MAJOR problem.
Purchasing Accessible Tickets
Anyone can buy accessible tickets online. There is no verification of disability. Businesses are not allowed in most cases to ask for proof of disability to purchase accessible tickets – it’s just “trust me bro”
And that is a problem when the law only says a venue needs 10 accessible seats per 1000. 25% of people in the US identify as a person with a disability. You do not need to be in a wheelchair to request an accessible seat (and that isn’t a problem)
Bots. Bots are the problem. If you’re in a queue, there’s a possibility that a bot will buy up accessible seating before they’re available for a person who needs it. Once I logged in five minutes after a concert went on sale – zero accessible tickets left. Hundreds if not thousands of arena seats available that I can’t use.
The solution for many venues is requiring people with disabilities to call the box office. I have no problem with this – except – it’s not TECHNICALLY following the law. The law states tickets need to be available to purchase in the same way non-accessible tickets are purchasable.
The Purchasing Experience
I recently bought tickets for Summerfest in June. Summerfest is the largest music festival in the world so you’d think they’d have the best practices. They don’t. I did get the tickets I want. It took me longer because it is not clearly stated anywhere that you needed to call the box office to purchase accessible tickets. It was only because ten years ago I bought tickets by calling, that I realized I had to call. I didn’t even have to sit in the queue for tickets I sat on hold to wait my turn.
The Secondary Market
The secondary market is nearly impossible to navigate. The law states a person with a disability can buy tickets off the secondary market and on the day of the event, switch the tickets out for accessible seats DEPENDING ON AVAILABILITY. That means you may just not be able to attend the event after all. It keeps me from going to Green Bay Packers games because it’s the ONLY way to get an accessible seat for a home game at Lambeau Field. You just have to pray that they have a set of accessible seats available for trade and it is already nearly impossible to get tickets to a Packers game unless you’re spontaneous and in Green Bay.
In conclusion, I believe the way to solve this is to provide proof of disability – just a doctor’s note that you scan into your account, it’s verified, you are a verified as a person with a disability. Yeah it’s an extra step but that’s better than missing an event all together. I don’t know what to do about the secondary market though, that’s a mess that Ticketmaster created and everyone has a problem with it disabled or not. One thing is true, something has to change.