Fanpass Review

Fanpass had a decent range of tickets available for the Newcastle fixture, offering various seating categories and price options.

I opted for the lower-priced tickets, and Fanpass provided a seating plan that clearly indicated where I would be seated.

Tickets ranged from £112 to over £300. I purchased a £112 seat, which was reasonable but, as I discovered, not the cheapest available.

A quick search on Ticket Compare revealed cheaper options from other platforms.

This included £94 tickets on LiveFootballTickets

…and around £75 on StubHub.

Although these resale tickets weren’t identical in seating location, it is worth noting that Fanpass didn’t offer the lowest prices.

I only needed a single ticket, but Fanpass makes it easy to buy multiple tickets for group seating, with several options available.

Fanpass accepts Visa, Mastercard, and Amex but does not support PayPal. Also disturbing is that my initial payment was flagged by my bank as suspicious.

After confirming it was a legitimate transaction, the payment was processed successfully.

The platform’s order status tracker, showing stages like ‘confirmation pending’ and ‘delivered,’ was useful for following my ticket purchase.

Fanpass promises immediate e-ticket delivery.

I received an email about my ticket just two minutes after purchase, and it was simple to add the ticket to my phone’s wallet for easy access.

I didn’t need to contact customer support during my purchase, but to test Fanpass’s responsiveness, I sent an email asking about the ‘your seller is a trusted seller’ symbol that appears on all of their listings.

While they responded within three hours, the explanation that sellers are marked as trusted based on a ‘certain amount of time’ working with Fanpass felt vague and unsatisfying.

It seems that every listing features this symbol. Given some of the issues that the site has had with unreliable sellers, the symbol seems generic and doesn’t generate any extra trust.

The email response did not provide the reassurance I had hoped for, leaving me unsure about the legitimacy of the criteria used to verify sellers. So is Fanpass safe? I’m not so sure.

Fanpass provides a guarantee that if a seller pulls out, they will offer a replacement ticket or refund.

I was also reminded of the guarantee as I was about to make the payment, which eased my mind a little.

This is reassuring, though in some cases, a replacement may not be possible due to the nature of the secondary market.

As we’ll show below, a refund isn’t going to be an ideal solution if you’ve been turned away at the venue on matchday.

It is also concerning that you have to provide evidence of refused entry to qualify for a refund. Still, this is a point worth keeping in mind—you have to be sure to obtain a note from the organiser if you get turned away.

Fees are an inevitable part of any secondary market transaction. With that in mind, it would be better if the platform could be as up-front as possible about what the fees are used for. The wording in this section is vague and confusing:

One scenario that comes up often is a seller being unable to provide the tickets that were advertised, either due to fake or duplicate tickets.

This leaves fans in a difficult situation, especially those traveling from abroad who have already booked flights and accommodation.

Another recurring issue is tickets not working at the turnstiles, with fans being turned away disappointed. There are also cases where the tickets received are completely different from those advertised.

In the best scenarios, this might mean different seats within the stadium, but in worse situations, the tickets are intended for juniors or senior citizens.

Throughout this process it seems that, like me, many customers were kept in the dark about their tickets. This goes for people who were able to get into the venue, as much as those who were turned away.

Using the secondary market to attend events naturally comes with some trepidation, so it’s a major black mark against Fanpass that they weren’t able to offer responsive and personalised assurance in the days before the event.

In many of these instances, Fanpass appears to provide refunds.

However, this does not compensate for the inconvenience, expenses, and disappointment of being let down on what should be a special occasion.

On platforms like Complaintsboard.com, unresolved complaints suggest that Fanpass could improve its handling of problematic sellers.

Something that hasn’t affected me but should be mentioned in my Fanpass review is that a massive cache of user data was stolen from the site back on April 30, 2022.

The leak was flagged by Mozilla Monitor, a security service that uses data from ‘Have I Been Pwned?’ to scan for compromised accounts in known data breaches.

The records of more than 112,000 customers were exposed in the breach. As you can see, they included names, physical addresses, phone numbers, purchase histories, and more.

Security is crucial when making any transaction online, and a breach like this further undermines confidence, in an industry where trust is essential.

So this is something we will have to take into account in our review score.