Thank you Dustin. I appreciate your response and empathize with your quandary.
I believe upward of 3/4 of all tickets for the Phish shows in Telluride were will call and required the ticket holder to be present and have the credit card used for purchase to pick up their tickets. As far as I remember, there wasn’t a logistical nightmare for the most part. I’m not sure what they did as far as making allowances for transfers and such, but I do know there are ways. I’d say go ahead and make the vast majority of tix will call only … not just holiday tix. Build in a fee of a couple buck to allow for TBF to deal with transfers and such.
Personally, I don’t like will call unless it’s necessary due to timing or is substantially less $ vs. delivery … since it kind of ropes you in moreso. Leftover Salmon is playing at the Sheridan Opera house in March … which is will call only … which wasn’t my first preference at the time given that the rumor mill has SCI playing WC in Broomfield on that weekend, but if you look closely at the SOH website, they have a procedure for transferring a will call ticket. It’s somewhat involved, so it’s a bit of a PITA, but it probably deters scalpers & allows for a pathway for people to change their plans. To make the long story short: I’m totally willing to live with the will call hassle if it extracts scalpers from the equation!
Well put response Dustin.
Phoebe and I came to Telluride for the first time last year, despite wanting to for at least a decade. We made the trip all the way from Australia. We had friends that wanted to come but couldn’t get tickets. We had such a great time and met so many wonderful people that we are planning to come back in 2012. This time we bought our own tickets ASAP along with a few extras for our friends. So I can totally see how ticket demand could increase this rapidly and sell this fast. With only 10,000 tickets… I am surprised there are tickets still left. Even at the full price of $195+$60 for camping, this is the best value ticket I know of for 4 days of incredible music and camping. (to compare… the Byron Bay Blues and Roots festival in Australia is $495 for a 5 day ticket and another $280 for 5 days of camping)
The key point here is that most of these tickets are not going to scalpers, they are going to genuine patrons. And there are still tickets left. Anyone who really wants to go to Telluride or has been planning to go to Telluride can still get tickets right now. And if it’s too early for people to commit… well… planet bluegrass is the only organisation I can think of that offers refunds. So getting tickets now is risk free. (Town Park tickets are a different issue)
Dustin, I think you are doing a brilliant job with TBF. You should sleep well at night.
Cheers Jason
Thanks for the response Dustin.
I was a little surprised at the servers to be honest because I had a feeling all along the demand would be really high after last year’s TBF. I never really thought I’d end up feeling lucky to get high school camping after an hour of trying to get my credit card accepted.
As for the scalpers that do exist, I’d totally support will call only for all tickets. I actually, accidentally, chose “mail” for my camping tickets and was basically afraid to make a change to my cart at that point! It seems will call would be the way we could all sleep better somehow.
Will Call
This will be my wife’s and my tenth consectutive TBF. We drive from southern Indiana and have never used Will Call until this coming year. Last year as we were driving west on I-70 just out side of St. Louis, MO, it dawned on me that I had forgot to bring our tickets. Driving back to Bloomington and back would have added six plus hours to our day. Luckily our neighbors have a key to our house and I was able to tell them exactly where the tickets were. We get to Telluride a couple of days early and we had our tickets on Tuesday. After that near fiasco last year, I think I will use Will Call from now on. I’m getting older and can not remember minor details like tickets anymore. Do any of you know what kind of ID Planet Bluegrass requires to claim your tickets from Will Call?
I think you just need a valid photo ID and the CC used to purchase them. I did will call this year (after driving 30 minutes and realizing I had forgotten my ticket the previous year), and I don’t recall it being much of a hassle.
A drivers ID. Easy way to stay on track-will call. I use it every fest. One year I held all the tickets for 5 months, passed them out before fest and ON THE WAY walkin to fest one of our party dropped their ticket in the dark street. We all searched for an hour on hands and knees. I did finally find it. But will call is the way to go.
I’m with BluegrassOZ on this one. Who has ever heard of a company offering ticket refunds for anything? No “convenience” charges, a genuine interest in the community they serve and the environment…PBG fosters something I haven’t seen anywhere else. Not trying to blow smoke up anyone’s you-know-what, but it’s true. 
SHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh see right there, THATS the problem! This has been a very well known fact and secret for years. But if you keep tellin folks then we’ll NEVER get tickets again! :lol
Such a great happening and such good folks. Very organized and the best Fest ever, anywhere! I agree! :medal
Can’t argue with the truth
I think the idea of WillCall pickup for all Holiday sales…is great! I have never had a problem getting my tickets when I get to the fest! Its a first activity, right after a cold Fat Tire! I just wish someone would have seen this coming! It is happening anywhere where there is a croud of more than 10,000 for an event with great acts!
To get back to a positive point… Here are some ideas for keeping this very hard for the scalpers to make money with this fest in the future!
:thumbsup As suggested…Will Call pickup of all Holiday Ticket Purchases
:thumbsup Lottery for past festavarians… You got our names and addresses! Send us a pre-sales email…
:thumbsup Festavarian Club Card… You can only get a club card if you go to the fest the year before! Club members get first dibs.
:thumbsup Limit sales of large numbers of tickets to the same person or credit card number.
These are some good ideas, but if Dustin is correct, the sell out of Holiday Priced Tickets was not obviously due to scalpers, but perhaps to a new awareness in The Festival. I would like to make it harder for the dirty, rotten scalpers to aquire cheap tickets, but not for novice Festivarians who may be your new best friends by the end of the 2012 TBF.
I’ve used so called “Flash Tickets” from Ticket Horse several times now. It’s actually easier than print out tickets or hard tickets. You just swipe your CC and you ticket prints out…super fast, super easy. I don’t think it would be a logistical nightmare at all. The problem is Ticket Horse (pretty sure they did the Phish Town Park tickets) has their own secondary market website…so it defeats the purpose a bit. I think the ultimate solution would be if you could sell them as non-transferable flash tickets and stop Ticket Horse from reselling.
That said, for something this great it’s always going to be stressful getting tickets…nothing you can do about that.
Signed, lucky to be in Warner.
Or you could just update the PB internet server so it can handle the traffic on ticket sale mornings. I was into my cart by 9:05, only to keep getting “timed out” and didn’t end up getting them purchased until about 9:45. I was the only one in about 15 or so of us WF veterans that got a ticket.
I don’t know what I am to do with all my cases of honey and mead for nest year. I may need to meet some new friends at warner field this year to help me consume this nectar. Otherwise, I think I will end up being blacked out for the whole 6 days in a drunken shitshow of a slumber… 
Bring it into Town Park! I’m sure there are plenty of Town Park campers that would love to share your brew. :cheers
I think the jury is still out on what is going on here. From Dustin’s feedback it doesn’t sound like a well organized scalper attack. This is kinda backed up by what I see on stub hub. When I bought my full price tics I saw an “8 max” message below the qty box. I assume that it was also there for the holiday tickets?? If so there are so far only two low lifes trying to sell 8 tickets. The rest are a mix of 2 to 4 tickets. If some folks are trying to finance their trip on the backs of festivarians by scalping I hope a critter (of the non-guitar playing variety) eats their bacon! Of course there are still tickets for sale at full price. Not sure why these folks are posting tickets for $495 min when you can still buy them for $195. Curious to know if the run on tickets extended to the full priced.
I’m sure I’ll appear as a newbie - gotta do something about that - have only missed one fest since 2001. My first post because I feel scalping for $500 and up can threaten the best fest in the land. Thanks to PBG for fostering this environment and festivarian family. Nowhere else would we even have heard from Dustin. Festivarians - PBG will need our help on this one. I for one pledge to never buy scalper tickets. I have said a few times that the Elks Park line-up is good enough just to come and hang there without fest tickets.
:wave
That is a wonderful idea, Tom!
:thumbsup
I have been thinkin about how fast this sold and I think it is just a sign of the times. For each festvarian we are linked to at the very least 10 more and so on. Technology is a beautiful thing.