A couple of weeks ago, there was a press release from the company Ticket Text covered in both the Irish Examiner and the Irish Independent. According to the article:

The credit card-based service is currently offering tickets for various events including the Punchestown National Hung Festival, the Arts Festival and a number of top music concerts.

To me, the Ticket Text service is a great new concept – you buy your tickets online, and they arrive to your phone by text, with a barcode. You then just bring your phone to the gig and the barcode is read to allow you entry. Those who’ve recently visited Croke Park will be familiar by now with the ticket barcode scanner – though I’m sure it’s elsewhere by now also.

The big selling point (apart from the obvious convenience) is that Ticket Text claim to “save you money by never charging postage & packaging fees, plus we always keep our booking fees low”. According to the Irish Examiner article,

Ticket Text’s chief executive Mark McLaughlin said Ireland was the first place the company identified a demand for an alternative ticketing provider.

So, do we have an alternative to the much-maligned TicketMaster? Unfortunately, that I can discover after doing a bit of investigaton, Ticket Text are not going to disrupt the stranglehold that TicketMaster have over Irish ticket-buying consumers.

As a check, I went to buy 2 adult tickets for Ireland v Columbia in London coming up soon. And would you believe it – there is no comparison to be made. You can buy one sort of ticket on the Ticket Text site (home fans = Irish Fans), and on the TicketMaster site, you can only buy away fan (Columbian fans) tickets. So, for the same game, you can’t buy the same ticket on both sites.

If I was to go ahead with the ticket purchases, the comparative prices I was charged were as follows:

TicketMaster

And from Ticket Text:

So, the proportion of the overall fee which is made up of charges for the TicketMaster tickets is 14%, while the percentage for Ticket Text is 7%. An interesting comparison for sure and something that you’d like to see, but remember, we’re not comparing like with like.

I’ll have more on this tomorrow, but as you can see, if between Ticket Text and TicketMaster you’re not going to be able to buy the exact same tickets, then there’s no real competition.