Coldplay ticket row: BookMyShow CEO summoned again after he skips previous summons

Mumbai Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has summoned BookMyShow parent Big Tree Entertainment’s CEO Ashish Hemrajani after he skipped the earlier summons issued on September 27. He has been asked to appear before the investigating officer on Monday and record his statement. 

The case revolves around the complaint made by advocate Amit Vyas about the alleged black-marketing of the British band’s concert tickets.

The sole right to sell tickets for the upcoming Coldplay concert was given to BookMyShow but they were also sold on other websites at prices higher than the ticket price. Following the ticketing fiasco, Vyas filed a complaint with the EOW.  

Speaking to India Today, Vyas said that he was already logged into the BookMyShow system before the ticket sale started at 12 pm on September 22. However he was logged out of the system as the sale went live, he said. Vyas said he tried to log in again but there was no response for 15 minutes. 

Vyas said that the tickets were already available on Viagogo when the sale went live on BookMyShow. He said when he was finally able to log in after 15 minutes, the ticket prices had shot up. 

He said he then received a message that the show was sold out. When he came to know about the third concert on January 21. Vyas said when he tried to log in, it showed that 9.99 lakh people were already ahead of him in the queue. 

The advocate said that nothing like this had ever happened while booking tickets for other live concerts. He added that no one he knows got a ticket for Coldplay. 

“While people reported that these tickets were available offline for Rs 10-12 lakh, I personally checked on Viagogo and there were two tickets for Rs 27 lakh. The ticket price that Coldplay had kept for India was from Rs 2500 to Rs 35,000, and the price for those who stood in the ground was Rs 6,450,” he said. 

Ticket sales for Coldplay's concerts began on September 22 at noon, but shortly after, the online ticketing platform BookMyShow crashed. The site experienced a significant surge in traffic, with over 7 lakh people queuing to secure their tickets. After about 20 minutes of downtime, BookMyShow was back online, allowing fans to continue their quest for tickets to this highly anticipated event.