DEAL DEAD – When AMEX let you backdoor TM

You guys remember “back in the day” when Ticketmaster didn’t have queues and as soon as tickets went on sale, you got in and there was basically only 2 options – quanity of seats and whether you wanted ‘Best Available’ or some other weird option? And you’d push search and it came back with some options. You could then hit search again and then it’d pull up more options. You repeated this until all the tickets were sold out.

Eventually Ticketmaster set up a queue system and also changed their search sytem to a map where you chose your seats or whatnot. I don’t remember when/how I found out that AMEX had a backdoor, but AMEX did. Back when they were heavily promoting their entertainment and concerts to your email, if you clicked through to the URL https://global.americanexpress.com/entertainment/home and when tickets dropped, you were given a similar search function of the old Ticketmaster. You picked quantity of tickets and hit SEARCH. That’s it. You bypassed the queue system. You can then buy those tickets or drop them and search again. Not ALL concerts were available, but most of the good ones were. This was how I was able to get BTS tickets, Garth Brooks shows (best I got was 7th row from stage,) Jay-Z when he played the intimate show in NYC, Halsey in NYC, Rage Against the Machine tour, etc. The last show I remember it worked on was probably Rage. The most memorable one that it worked on was DMB playing the Cosmopolitan in Vegas (super small venue for them.) I was able to pull GA tickets for $160 and immediately flipped them for about $600 each.

I think AMEX finally took it down in early 2020. I waited almost 3 years to make this post, hoping it would come back, but it never did. This was the unicorn of the tickets world. RIP AMEX backdoor to TM.