Daedong-je, the spring festival of Pusan National University (PNU), was held again for the first time in four years. Famous singers have been invited to the festival, so ticket scalping has happened. The price of the ticket, which was free, was raised by reselling. The organizers of the festival have not solved this problem. Students are criticizing the problem, saying it was predictable.

Ahead of Daedong-je, PNU Emergency Planning Committee (EPC) distributed 1,000 free pre-tickets for the concert on May 19th to 490 undergraduates (including one companion) online.

Ticket scalping happened because the performance singers were Gummy and Winner, who are famous singers. Every May, when university festivals start, the scalping ticket becomes a social problem. Because the ticket price rose as high as the so-called “Premier” from 10,000won to 60,000won. PNU also sold tickets for this year’s Daedong-je, so it faced a similar situation.

Ticket scalping is conducted by lending PNU students’ ID cards at the same time as pre-ticket resales. This is because EPC checks whether they brought their student ID cards when entering the performance.

Since May 14th, when the pre-ticket sale began, various online communities have been flooded with posts about reselling tickets for Daedong-je. In “Everytime,” an anonymous online PNU students’ community, posts about resale such as “I will buy the ticket of Daedong-je at 60,000 won”, “I’ll give you a reward for the transfer of ticket” and “premium price is, of course, possible” have been posted.

On May 17th, posts about resale such as “I’ll pay the price of the ticket as you suggest” and “I’m looking for a pre-ticket, I’ll buy you coffee or dinner” were posted on “Twitter.” On the same day, the resale ticket posts were uploaded on “Carrot Market,” the secondhand trading app.

According to an interview with students of PNU, tickets were traded at prices between 20,000 won and 40,000 won. Especially on “Twitter,” not only ticket scalping but also lending student ID cards was being made available. Ticket transfer with lending of student ID cards were being traded at about 70,000 won.

PNU students are furious about this kind of resale of tickets. This is because unspecified people make unfair profits from the event hosted by the student membership fee, and outsiders can participate in the event through the scalped ticket. Due to the restriction on the number of people attending the concert, PNU students are dissatisfied because they could not fully enjoy the festival.

There are also criticisms against the EPC, which has carried out ticket sales for Daedong-je without any appropriate countermeasures. Some argued that it would be possible to prevent such a situation if they had operated a “scalping ticket accusation center.” On May 14th, a lot of criticisms such as “Didn’t you think there would be people who resell a companion ticket?” and “I wanted to go to the festival for a long time, but It is ridiculous that I am considering scalping ticket because graduate students couldn’t buy a ticket for the festival” were posted on “Everytime.”

Students who we met at the festival reacted negatively to the ticket scalping. An anonymous PNU student A said, “I think the ticket scalping has occurred due to limiting the number of people entering the concert and it can be expected but EPC is not curbing those actions, but rather ignoring them.” Another anonymous PNU student B (Dept. of Mechanical Engineering) said, “EPC should have considered various problems and it is questionable whether they can block a number of people suspected of purchasing a scalped ticket.

In response, EPC explained that it was impossible to prevent ticket scalping, and they tried taking measures such as finding the location of ticket scalping. An official of EPC said, “In order to prevent ticket scalping, we thought of countermeasures, that only those with certified student numbers could buy pre-ticket or we could operate a booth to sell tickets on-site, but it was too time-consuming, and it was not cost-effective. We are trying to figure out how much the price of resale tickets is and where the main locations of ticket scalping are. We are discussing ways to return the canceled tickets, which were canceled because of identity theft, to PNU students.”

Reporter Yun Seo-Jin

Translated by Seo Hae-Sung