Democrat Rep. Robert Matzie sponsored H.B. 463 this session. The bill allows for civil lawsuits against second hand sellers of event tickets, specifically when they sell a ticket for a seat that is not actually available. These secondary sellers will give a refund if that happens—  but some lawmakers argue the inconvenience is worth penalizing.

HB463 passed the Pennsylvania House on June 4 with 191-11 votes in favor. It now sits in the Senate’s Consumer Protection & Professional Licensure Committee. Below is a transcript of this sit down interview:

 

KARA JEFFERS (ENN REPORTER): "Hello, Welcome to Harrisburg. I'm Kara Jeffers, here with Representative Rob Matzie for your weekly Bill Break. Representative, you have a bill that's kind of dealing with speculative ticketing. Tell me about this problem that you've discovered."

MATZIE: "Well, we learned about this last session… What happened was a former staff member had made a purchase online for baseball tickets to a Phillies game. It was game two of the season, and he had a friend coming in from out of town.

As he was on his way down the turnpike from Harrisburg to Philadelphia for the game, he got an email telling him that, uh, you don't have a ticket. And here's your refund."

[So what is speculative ticketing? Secondary sellers will buy large chunks of event tickets, then re-sell them. However, these secondary sites sometimes sell tickets for a seat they don’t have. When this happens, the site can wait till the day of an event before alerting a customer that the ticket is not available. A refund is given, but the inconvenience remains.]

“We held a hearing on this last session, where several smaller venues and artists shared their concerns. What’s happening is, secondary markets are buying up large swaths of tickets of areas, or at least advertising that they have them. And then all of a sudden people go in and try and get those tickets [from the official venue or artist] and there’s none left.

“What customers have to look out for [on the secondary sites], is this is not a ticket in and of itself. Because it doesn't give you a seat number. It might give you a section, or an area of the stadium, but there is no seat number and that's kind of sort of the red flag you have to look out for."

"It's something we need to fix. It's a very simple bill— if you don't have it, you can't sell it."

JEFFERS: “And that is.. you have a House bill to address this issue. Specifically, what does your legislation do?"

MATZIE: "Legislation puts in some penalties. It allows for the local district attorney's to be the one, from a private right of action, to be in place if folks feel that they have been wronged."

JEFFERS: "What is the opposition? Is there any opposition that you've heard from people?"

MATZIE: "Some of the opposition really from the perspective of the private right of action, that they believe it might be too harsh or that the attorney general should should really play a bigger role in it. The attorney general’s office does have a role. We’ve been in touch this session and they do support this consumer protection bill. And, you know, a couple of the secondary sellers think that we can do this without going as far as we're going. And I just say, look, you have to have some type of penalty in place to prohibit folks from trying to do this."

JEFFERS: "So when it comes to tax money, any costs, any benefit, are people going to have to pay for anything extra or not really part of this?"

MATZIE: "Really nothing, no. I mean, it's a it's a neutral bill. There's there's no fiscal impact on folks. It's truly telling folks that, hey, you know, your website's got to be specific. It's got to be a seat. It's got to be an actual piece of tangible property. Real property, so to speak."

JEFFERS: "All right, Representative, thank you so much for your time. And that is the end of Bill Break."