With less than two months left before the Eurovision Song Contest in May, it’s already hard to buy a ticket for the upcoming shows.
While tickets are available for most of the dress rehearsals, tickets for the actual contest are running out quickly.
All of the shows from May 8 to May 13 will be held at Ukraine’s International Exhibition Center on the left bank of Kyiv. The center has a capacity of between 12,000 and 14,000 people. In total, the organizers will issue around 70,000 tickets.
On March 21, concert.ua, the official Eurovision 2017 ticket distributor, had only two tickets left for one of the live shows – the first semi-final show on May 9 for a price of either 48 euros or 65 euros.
All of the tickets so far put on sale for the second semi-final and grand final have sold out, although another batch of tickets will be released for sale in April, after the organizers finish accreditation of press and fans.
However, the official ticket sales website warns that there still might be not enough tickets for the grand final show. The first and second batch of grand final tickets, released on Feb. 14 and Feb. 23, sold out almost immediately, with many people waiting for hours in an online queue still ending up with nothing.
At least 15,000 Eurovision tickets were sold in February, with the grand final live show and rehearsals being the most popular ones, according to the National Broadcasting Company of Ukraine, which is responsible for organizing the Eurovision song contest in Ukraine.
Nevertheless, those looking for tickets on the internet can still find some options from scalpers and websites – but for up to five times the price.
For example, typing “Eurovision tickets” in Russian or Ukrainian brings up an obscure website www.stubhub-ua.com.ua, which claims to have more than 100 tickets for all nine Eurovision shows, including the live grand final.
The Russian-language website www.stubhub-ua.com.ua was registered by Internet Invest Ltd., a Kyiv-based company, but is hosted in California in the United States.
While the tickets for the grand final on the official website concert.ua ticketing agency website cost from 51 to 553 euros, the cheapest ones on the website start at 223 euros. The most pricey ones – for the VIP zone – are on sale for around 2,800 euros.
Ukrainian classifieds website OLX has more than hundred postings from people selling tickets for various Eurovision shows and rehearsals, for up to Hr 30,000 (1,032 euros) for a ticket that gives access to six out of nine of the shows, including the grand final. The same tickets were sold out for between 207 euros and 408 euros at concert.ua.
Concert.ua still has tickets for nine shows, held from May 8-13, for 8 euros to 500 euros.
Earlier, the sale of Eurovision tickets was put on hold after the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine on Feb. 6 canceled the result of a tender won by Concert.ua, saying the process hadn’t been transparent.
The tender was held via online procurement system Prozorro, which allows the public to track all of the bids made by companies to provide services.
Pavlo Hrytsak, the deputy general director of the National Broadcasting Company of Ukraine, denied there had been any wrongdoing during the holding of the tender.
Later, NTU signed a contract with V Ticket ticket agency, the company that operates Concert.ua website, for the symbolic sum of Hr 1.20.
According to Ukraine’s Antimonopoly Committee, the NTU is not obliged to hold a tender when the value of a contract is less than Hr 200,000 (around $7,500 or 6,900 euros).
