Bon Jovi Wells Fargo Center Tickets Slashed to $22

Doylestown native Pink sold out her December 6th Wells Fargo Center show way back in September. But aging rock icon Jon Bon Jovi isn’t having quite the same draw for his November 5th show at the venue. Tickets are being discounted to $22.

The website Travelzoo announced the deal on Monday morning to its subscribers, with savings of up to 40% off the regular ticket prices. Seats in sections 203 to 210A are being offered for $22, marked down from the regular price of $36.50, and it’s rather shocking that blue-collar draw Bon Jovi can’t sell some of the cheapest seats in one of his biggest markets without dropping the price.

Meanwhile, seats in sections 103, 104, 110 and 111 will set you back $82, down from $126.50. So those people trying to sell marked-up tickets in 110 on StubHub for $425 (each!) are probably going to be out of luck.

The discounts are part of a growing trend in the struggling concert industry, where promoters find themselves desperate to fill seats and avoid huge losses. Over the summer, Groupon promoted a 49-percent-off deal for a Backstreet Boys concert at the Susquehanna Bank Center. Heart couldn’t even fill the Tower Theatre this time last year without cutting prices for some seats by half. And it’s not just concerts for the (slightly) older set that are being affected: Groupon also posted tickets for Ke$ha at Festival Pier for a 50-percent discount.

But don’t worry. With all these discounts being offered, you’ll probably still get screwed by “fees.” In the Bon Jovi deal offered by Travelzoo, said fees work out to at least $12.10 per ticket plus $7 per order and a $3.25 delivery fee, for a total $22.35 in fees for a single-ticket purchase. In other words, your $22 ticket will cost actually cost you $44.35. Yep, the fees are more than the ticket itself. So somebody is still getting rich.

Here’s a video of Bon Jovi performing “Wanted Dead or Alive” at the Spectrum in 1989, back in the days when the band could easily sell out an arena and no one thought that ticket fee markups of 101.5 percent were somehow morally permissible. Rock on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmoOUxCUsAI