Tickets for Broadway’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child went on sale Wednesday to those who received single-use access codes, and it looks like Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program did what it was suppose to.
As of 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, all of the tickets allotted for today’s sale are gone. More tickets will be released in the next few months, according to the production.
All tix for our 1st release have now sold. Don’t worry! There will be plenty more chances to buy tix before previews begin. #CursedChildNYC
— Cursed Child NYC (@HPPlayNYC) October 18, 2017
And there’s some good news: At the time of this writing, very few Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets have been placed on StubHub, a website where tickets can be flipped for much higher than face value. This could mean that most tickets were sold to genuine Harry Potter fans who want to visit New York and experience “the eighth story.” The purpose of the Verified Fan program was to weed out scalpers and only give access to people who wanted to see the show themselves.
Further preventing tickets from being flipped, Ticketmaster is not giving customers access to their tickets until the week of their performance, which is surely stopping many people from listing on StubHub. Still, the ticket-swapping website always promises that the tickets you’re purchasing will get you into the show, so the people who are flipping have somehow figured out a way to get you in.
We browsed through the show dates on StubHub and found that each show has no more than 40 tickets available for the 1,500 seats that are in the theater. That said, the tickets that are for sale are listed at no less than $800 total for Parts 1 and 2. In most cases for the first two months of shows, tickets are being offered at $1,500 and skyrocket from there.
We do not know if anyone is actually buying tickets at those inflated scalper prices because StubHub is not displaying the prices of the tickets that have been sold. Over on eBay, no tickets have been sold yet, but one person managed to sell an access code for $500.
The prices of scalper tickets could inflate or deflate depending on how few tickets end up on StubHub. Come spring 2018, people who are desperate to see the show may be willing to pay three, four, five, six times the face value in order to enhance their trip to New York.
Some who were placed in the Standby pool — which most people ended up in — received codes later on Wednesday.