"They Have Valid Tickets" — Woman Says Ticketmaster Double Booked Seats in Beyonce Concert Fiasco

A woman questioned whether or not Ticketmaster double-booked her tickets with another couple at a Beyonce and Jay Z concert and posted about her experience in a series of viral Instagram Threads posts.

Helena Faustin (@thatnursecancook) relays her story about the Beyonce and Jay-Z concert she and her husband were excited to watch perform: "I remember a couple years ago my hubby got us tickets to see Beyoncé & Jay Z at Met Life Stadium. I was so excited, we were so hyped to go. We get there, weave through the crowds & excitement, locate our row & seats, and boom. Somebody is in our seats."

Trying to clear up the confusion, Faustin said that her husband explained to the couple that they had their own tickets for the seats this couple was sitting in: "Another guy & his girl. So we double & triple-check our tickets before we approach them and yep, they’re in our seats. My hubby politely tells them they’re in our seats and the guy looks up and is like 'nah i got tickets these is my seats.'"

The first thing that came to Faustin and her husband's minds was to get medieval on the couple — because they thought that there was no way in heck any self-respecting or halfway decent ticket reservation service would sell two of the same ticket.

The basic rule of reserving tickets and seats to an event, aka seat reservation 101 is that if someone pays for a seat, then that's their seat, it doesn't belong to anyone else and no one else is allowed to buy that seat from the ticket service provider — unless the person who has the seat decides to sell it.

Faustin explains that while things could've escalated to the point of no return, she and her husband ultimately decided to try and solve the issue in the most logical way possible: "So now hubby and I are looking at each other like how do we handle this most respectably because the Brooklyn in both of us wanted get froggy immediately"

"We go to security and we’re like hey there’s people in our seats and they don’t wanna move, can you handle it so we don’t have to? Security goes over, checks their tickets and says 'they have valid tickets'. So now i’m HOT. I say how is it that we both have tickets for the same 2 seats? Security looks at me like [blacnk face emoji]"

They were in a real conundrum: they were, indeed, in possession of valid tickets to those seats, as were the couple that they approached who were sitting in their seats.

It seems that Ticket Master made a huge error, but that didn't really help Faustin and her husband at that moment.

What did, however, was some quick thinking on Faustin's part, but not before getting upset that her and her husband were put into this situation to begin with: "Now I’m like, call the manager, his manager, Beyoncé & Jay z’s manager, and everybody else because somebody lying! Security says there’s nothing we can do. So I say, well…can you bring us down to the floor? Security pauses and says 'fine'"

Faustin decided to try asking for better, more expensive floor seats that were empty and thankfully the security guard accommodated their request because they had valid tickets as did the couple that were in the seats Faustin and her husband thought they purchased for their own Jay-Z and Beyonce experience.

She said that although she ended up having a wonderful time, she was concerned that Ticketmaster would allow for the double booking of seats: "And we ended up with floor seats for the concert about 10 rows in. It ended up being a great night but now I have anxiety about someone being in my seat whenever I go to a concert. Also, how is Ticketmaster allowed to get away with double booking seats?!"

Numerous commenters who replied to her story, however, had doubts that Ticketmaster was, indeed, booking multiple people for the same seats: "Ticketmaster didn't do it. Those people bought scalped fake tickets and bluffed you," one person said.

This was a sentiment echoed by someone else: "They knew those tickets were scalped that’s why they got there first"

And while there were throngs of folks who mentioned that it would be difficult for scalped tickets to pass security checks, this seemed to be the prevailing thought: "But how did he get fake tickets cleared by security?" one wondered.

"That part. Scalped tickets. Usually, the scalped ones don’t scan though."

In September of 2023, Beyonce "concert crashers" were outed on social media for purportedly finding ways to make it past security so they could make it to their unscrupulously secured seats before folks who (like Faustin says) bought their tickets legitimately through a platform like Ticketmaster.

Maybe it was an inside job between the people who purchased the fake tickets and a security guard who got bribed to let the folks in and they had printed out tickets as a fail safe just in case anyone asked any question?

What do you think happened? Did the folks who entered the concert happen to find a way past security and just had really convincing-looking physical tickets that were never scanned in the first place? Did they manage to get fakes that scanned? Or did Ticketmaster mess up?