First things first, let’s talk about what happens to tickets you’ve resold. If you resold tickets on Stubhub and the event is officially RESCHEDULED, then nothing happens. The sale stands whether you profited or lost money. If the event is CANCELLED, then Stubhub will try to charge your cc, assuming they’ve paid you out already. If you try to avoid this, then they’ll send you to collections and probably ban your account.
If you resold tickets back on Ticketmaster and the show is CANCELLED, then they’ll charge your cc for what they paid you out. Now if the show is RESCHEDULED, then the new buyer has the option to get a refund. If that happens, you get the tickets back and you then have the option to a) relist the tickets (recommended) or b) request a refund yourself. The reason why you want to relist the tickets is because you’ll have more time now to sell them for higher (which happened to me with Ariana Grande Tampa tickets.) And you actually have up until ~4 hours of showtime (may be different per event) to request a refund, but don’t wait that long! So let’s say it’s 2-3 days away and it’s not selling and you’ll be negative, you can pull the listing and request a refund. It’s like you’re playing with the house’s money – all upside and no downside in this scenario.
I will caution you though and this happened to me. Sometimes, TM won’t email you when the new buyer requests a refund. And they too have up until 4 hours before showtime to request a refund. I had an instance where the buyer cancelled like 5 hours before showtime and thus I missed the cutoff to cancel myself. I had to call TM to bitch at them to get my own refund. So if you have RESCHEDULED TM SALES, you better check on your tickets around the cutoff time, just in case the new buyer requests a refund.
As for the buying side, this isn’t going to stop me from buying tickets. Worst case, the sales get cancelled and I’ve just lost the opportunity cost of the float. Best case, I’ve made money on the sale. If I made money, it sucks, but if I lost money, then it’s great. So it’s a wash in my mind. I do think this will knock out a few small time ticket scalpers who don’t have the capital to float for months until payout.
I’ll end it with this quote, “Scared money don’t make no money.”