Hellotickets Review

As you can see, destinations, tours and activities dominate the upper portion of the homepage.

In our hunt for football tickets, the site’s own search tool wasn’t much help either, and gave us a couple of dead ends. But we were able to scroll down a little to find what we wanted.

We explored Hellotickets late in the football season, so it was difficult to get a true sample size of the breadth of tickets available on the site.

We found 51 tickets for the potential title decider between Barcelona and Villarreal. This was actually more than a few other leading ticket resale sites, like LiveFootballTickets, which had just under 20 listings for the same fixture.

However, for the local derby between Espanyol and Barcelona a few days earlier, Hellotickets had no listings at all, while a rival site, LiveFootballTickets offered 34 for that fixture.

Again, this may not be a true gauge of the quantity of tickets available for matches on Hellotickets, but perhaps shows a little inconsistency.

Finally, a quick look on StubHub, another industry leading site, revealed more than 200 tickets for Barcelona vs Villarreal.

After clicking on a fixture you’re greeted by a stadium map and a list of tickets in the left corner, with a popup asking you how many seats you need.

The clickable stadium map is clean and responsive, highlighting the possible location of your seats. As regular resale ticket purchasers we don’t expect a pinpoint indication of where our seat will be, so a general idea is fine by us.

If the ticket information on the initial listing looks a bit scant, clicking on it gives you another popup with a little more info about the match and the tickets you will receive.

Overall, this portion of the buying experience on Hello tickets is intuitive and clear, so no big complaints there.

One small issue is that a few sites, as we mentioned in our LiveFootballTickets review, offer the option of multiple fans sitting together, and this is clearly located in their listings.

You don’t get this kind of clarity with Hellotickets; just a statement that seats will be assigned in pairs.

To be as thorough as possible, we also checked out the process for buying concert tickets on Hellotickets. We had a look at how to buy Beyoncé tickets on this platform.

Again, this was a smooth experience, with clearly laid-out details and a large range of tickets, all clearly indicated on the stadium map. Hellotickets appears to be a strong resource for buying concert tickets.

Comparing prices on Hellotickets to leading secondary markets like LiveFootballTickets and StubHub, the site comes out pretty well.

At £155, the cheapest tickets available for Barcelona vs Villarreal were cheaper than LiveFootballTickets (£173.03), but more expensive than StubHub (£101.10) , which had by far the best deals for this match—it’s a factor we cover in our StubHub review.

If those prices seem steep across the board, keep in mind that Barcelona were on the cusp of a La Liga title at their home stadium. Demand for these Barcelona tickets was through the roof, while availability was low, driving up costs.

Everything was going fine in our experience with Hellotickets, until we entered our details and prepared to make a purchase.

Here’s an issue: It is only once you have entered your credit card details or chosen PayPal that you see what the real price of the tickets is.

From our experience it’s unusual to get that far into the payment without fees even being mentioned.

On other sites there may be a small primer, like “(+fees)” next to the price, just as a hint of what is to come.

While not exactly dishonest, this site’s method of keeping us in the dark until the final part of checkout made us feel a little uneasy, and needs to be taken into account in our review of Hellotickets.

For these La Liga tickets the fee worked out at around 19.5%, which is well below average across all of our encounters with secondary markets.

With some additional research, this percentage seems to fluctuate depending on the event, ranging from the high teens to the high 20s.

Since the ticket price shown throughout hellotickets.com does not include the fee—and the full price including the fee only appears at the final step—we calculate the fee as a percentage of that original price.

In the case of our Barcelona tickets, the £30 service fee represents approximately 19.35% of the quoted ticket price.

Using this calculation, we often encounter service fees of more than 30%. So Hellotickets definitely comes out looking good in this respect—it’s just a shame that we weren’t made aware of the service fee until the last second.

Unfortunately, the purchase is final and you will not be eligible for a refund as long as the event goes ahead:

“Cancellation policy for event tickets If the event is held and the ticket is valid, it will not be possible to cancel the tickets even when there is a restriction that limits or prevents the CUSTOMER from attending the event.”

We can’t stress this enough: Be flexible with your travel plans, in case the event is rescheduled within a day or two of the original time.

This is common with La Liga fixtures, which are never set in stone until around three weeks before the match takes place.

These days, physical tickets are practically unheard of, so you can expect some form of electronic ticket, whether it’s a PDF to print out or, more likely, a mobile ticket that you will scan from your wallet:

“Hellotickets will deliver the tickets to the CLIENT to the email address provided during the purchasing process, according to the type of ticket acquired, which will be described in the following section. 

Types of tickets:

PDF: you’ll get the tickets in your email address and you’ll have to print them to access the event. 

QR Codes: they’re codes that you directly download in your phone to be scanned and so you can access the venue. Tickets with QR codes don’t have to be printed. 

Mobile Transfer: These tickets are transferred through the platform Mobile Transfer by Ticketmaster. The tickets are mobile, so in order to access the event, you’ll have to show them in your phone and it’s not necessary to print them.”

Yes, that is a non-negotiable. You will need to fill out a form with your personal details before continuing to the checkout. This is laid out in their Ts & Cs:

“For the purchase of the Products offered by Hellotickets through its website, www.hellotickets.co.uk, registration is required. The CLIENT can register at any time before beginning the purchase process. 

Related to the registration process, the CLIENT is solely responsible for the quality of the data entered by him on the forms, and accepts the obligation to provide true, accurate and complete information about its identity, as requested in the forms registration, purchase and accreditation, as well as to update all registration data so that they remain true, accurate and complete.“

Not all secondary ticketing sites need you to register before making a purchase, and for some users it may be an inconvenience.

The vast majority of buyers (88%) have given Hellotickets a perfect score on Trustpilot.

We’ll provide a snapshot of what the happy customers had to say, but these glowing reviews mostly mention things like ease of use and their seamless event experience.

You can’t ask for much more than that from a secondary ticket market. So let’s look at a couple of examples. Most mention how easy it is to buy tickets, and we agree on that point.

Other users register their satisfaction at the whole process going through well, getting into the stadium with no trouble and getting seats in the location that was advertised.

Finally, in the days of mobile ticketing, a handful of reviewers noted how simple the process of receiving tickets is these days. Once you receive the email you can load the tickets into your wallet, and then you’re good to go.

We should point out that there will always be a small risk when you buy tickets on the secondary market, because the transaction relies on three parties.

So no website will have a pristine record—even so, 7% one-star reviews on Trustpilot is an excellent score.

It’s even more reassuring that many of the negative reviews of Hellotickets on Trustpilot stem from users who seem to be unaware of the norms of the secondary market.

So that means, some users will make a purchase and be uncomfortable about not being able to choose a seat number, when resale websites almost never offer this option.

Other buyers complain about the site’s cancellation policy. Again, Hellotickets is no different from any other secondary market in this respect.

Unfortunately, a small minority learn the hard way that the purchase is final, as is standard in this industry.

In that respect, it’s not possible to relist tickets on Hellotickets, so the lack of a p2p option does harm the user experience a little.

Our main advice is always to read the Terms & Conditions before checking out. Almost all of the negative reviews of Hellotickets concern outcomes that are clearly addressed on their site.

So while the lack of a peer-to-peer sale option is a drawback, we can’t take most of these complaints into account in our Hellotickets review.