Broadway.com

If you’re searching online for Broadway tickets, Broadway.com may look like the obvious – and official – place to buy them.

The site’s official-sounding name, combined with language on its homepage and in Google ads promoting “Official Broadway Tickets,” gives the impression that it operates as the primary box office. Its “Buyer Guarantee” further reassures shoppers that tickets come “straight from the source,” as opposed to from a reseller on the secondary market.

But this marketing message clashes with the reality.

Broadway.com is not an official Broadway ticketing platform. It is a ticket reseller that operates on the secondary market – meaning it buys and resells tickets at marked-up prices.

This distinction is disclosed, but only in less visible places, such as in a ticket reseller license linked at the very bottom of Broadway.com. A separate “Reseller Notice,” similarly buried on the site in its terms and conditions, further states that Broadway.com “is for the secondary sale of tickets” and is not affiliated with “any venue, box office or event.”

The reseller notice also warns that “the price of a ticket we offer for sale may exceed the established price of the ticket.” When TINA.org compared the prices on Broadway.com to prices available through Broadway.org – the official website for Broadway productions that directs buyers to authorized vendors such as Telecharge, Ticketmaster and Broadway Direct – we discovered price hikes of over $100 for the same seats. Broadway.com refers to this extra cost as an all-encompassing “Service & Handling fee,” which can run over a third of the ticket price as the following sampling shows.

We also found Broadway.com using a different seating chart with an extra row in the orchestra, compared to the seating chart on Telecharge’s website, for an off-Broadway show.

Consumers take the stage

Over the years, consumers have complained about being misled into believing that Broadway.com is directly affiliated with Broadway only to then face exorbitant fees like those noted above.

“I though[t] Broadway.com was the gold standard,” wrote one consumer on Reddit who sought advice after encountering a 45% service fee on the site. Another user reported that Broadway.com “kept popping up at the top of my google search for ‘broadway official website.’”

Consumers on Broadway.com’s Trustpilot profile have also reported getting hit with high fees and complained that dealing with the company’s customer service is a drama of its own.

(Of note, although Broadway.com has a 4.7-star rating on Trustpilot, the review platform warns that the company may be getting reviews through “unsupported invitation methods,” which can “lead to bias and compromise the reliability of reviews.”)

Broadway.com did not respond to a request for comment. Trustpilot also did not respond to an inquiry regarding its warning to consumers.

The bottom line

Behind the curtain of this website touting official Broadway status lies a ticket reseller with a high service fee. Consumers looking to purchase Broadway tickets online should go directly through Broadway.org or the website for the show itself to get connected to an authorized ticket vendor.

Find more of our coverage on fees and imposter scams.