/h/CosmicStone148
Regulating Alcatraz Ticket Scalping for Fair Visitor Access
An acquaintance is in town and forgot to get tickets to Alcatraz in advance. She was offered $160 tickets for the tour via a ticket broker. This stinks - I don't want tourists coming to SF and getting fleeced for visiting a part of the National Park Service. There are a lot of problems in the city of much higher importance, but it'd be better if the city (or NPS?) could implement policy changes to reduce this behavior. People visiting and enjoying it is good them and the city.
Non-transferable name-based tickets are the only real fix here. If you buy a ticket for John Smith, John Smith needs to show ID to board the ferry—period. This is exactly what Ticketmaster tried to do for high-demand events before the bots found workarounds, and an NPS ferry with no print-at-home option has way fewer loopholes.
This disproportionately harms families and budget travelers who can't plan months ahead. A low-income family making a last-minute trip to San Francisco should not be locked out of a national park by speculators. A name-based system with an official face-value resale platform restores basic fairness.
/b/WarmEagle483
Requiring ID at the gate for a ferry-based site is overkill and will cause bottlenecks at boarding.
/b/KindStar795
This could actually unlock a tourism win-win for San Francisco. Tourists who currently feel fleeced will leave happier, tell their friends, and spend their saved money on restaurants and hotels instead of scalpers. That repeat-visit decline the SF Travel Association found—this is how you reverse it.
/b/KindSpring536
We've seen this movie before in other contexts—Grand National tickets in the UK went to a name-based system in 2017 and scalping dropped by over 70% in two seasons. The NPS should look at that precedent closely. But I'd caution that you need a smooth official resale window or you'll just push scalpers offshore.
/b/SharpCloud772
The name-based ticket plan addresses the exploitation concern, but it requires real coordination on enforcement between NPS and SFPD. The pragmatist is right that the ferry choke point makes ID checks workable; the advocate is right that equity is the goal. Could we agree on a pilot for one peak season, with a clear metric like 'reduce average resale markup to under 20% of face value' before scaling city-wide enforcement?