Tuesday, March 29, 2011

TicketsBuy: Comparison ticket shopping

One thing many people love is going out to a show or sporting event. I have one friend who’s so into them that she owns a pair of those old style theater binoculars in the event she doesn’t get very good seats. She brags about seeing (the same play) in various towns. Or then there’s always the discussion of who played the Phantom, or whether this Christine DaaĆ© was as good as the last one. These musical aficionados enjoy knowing everything there is to discover about the performances.
Of course they’re also familiar with another aspect of the theater attendance- ticket prices. The cost of going to a show can be fairly expensive. To those that haven’t inherited vast sums of money from a distant uncle, it can be a large ticket item in one’s budget. Rather than foregoing attendance to these cultural events, now there’s a way to make sure you get the best ticket price possible. TicketsBuy is a comparison shopping site for events throughout the entertainment and sporting industry. With it you can ensure you’re buying cheapest tickets prices available.

TicketsBuy Home

At its core, TicketsBuy is a meta search engine. It gathers data about events from the organizations commissioned to sell tickets for them. It then returns the results in an easy to read list accompanied by a map of the available seating. The entries are designated by section, row, and provider. It also lists the price per seat. By clicking on the entry it brings up the exact reason why it’s beneficial to use TicketsBuy to find tickets for upcoming events. It shows you the bottom line. That is, it shows you the price offered by the various ticket distributors. These vendors include TicketsNow, TicketNetwork, and VividSeats. There’s also the Direct-to-Sellers option which sells them via their network which is often the cheapest option.
The search tool, which is on the home page, can be used to search by zip code, venue, or event. So if you’re looking for ideas then you can type in the location of where you’re looking. This would be particularly helpful if you’re planning a vacation somewhere and would like see what shows are coming up at that time. In other cases you may know the venue, such as if you know you’d like to watch the San Francisco Giants play at AT&T park, you can type that in. Searching on event is helpful if you heard that your favorite musician is coming to town and you just want to know where they’re playing.
Once you find the event you’re interested it brings up the aforementioned results page. It has a series of filters you can use to hone in on exactly the seats you’re interested in. You can filter on Quantity of adjacent seats, minimum and maximum value of ticket prices, and ticket sources. Let’s say you prefer purchasing tickets from a particular vendor. You can search on those tickets first to see what’s available. It’s easy to adjust the filter later once you find the seats you’re looking for so you can browse through the other vendors. There’s also the exact seats option. Many events are sold only by section and row, but if you’d like to only view seating where you can be sure of the seat number, you can filter based upon this.

TicketsBuy Seating

Let’s say you’re researching a show and have a number of seats that seem good. For this, TicketsBuy has a favorites mechanism. Just click on the star and it’s added to your favorites. Once you’ve selected all the tickets you might be interested in, click on the favorites tab. Here they’ll all be listed so you make a final decision. All favorites are handled internally so there are no accounts to register for.
TicketsBuy is a great way to get tickets. Be them sporting events, concert tickets, plays, or musicals, it helps you ensure you’re getting the best price possible. The easy to use search engine along with readily sorted tickets allows you to quickly find the tickets you want. With TicketsBuy, you can go to the same event, for less.