Vivid Seats Review

Vivid Seats has only recently branched out to the European market, and football isn’t prominent when you land on the site. In fact, it’s pushed quite low on their menus.

From the homepage you have to navigate the “Sports” menu and find “Soccer”. As you can see, it’s not all that obvious on the menu.

After clicking the “Soccer” link you will then have to scroll past a list of Major League Soccer teams and tournaments in the Americas, before arriving at the “Top International Soccer Teams” sections.

Listed here are La Liga, Premier League and Serie A teams like FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Arsenal and Inter Milan.

Buyers may be confused by the site’s use of American listing conventions. So for example, the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and CD Leganés is listed backwards as “CD Leganés at FC Barcelona”.

It’s a minor issue, but illustrates how the site isn’t quite geared towards a European audience.

The choice of tickets for football matches can be a little sparse. For our chosen fixture there were 23 listings, located across all areas of the stadium. Prices started at £40.80 on the shortsides and climbed sharply to £724 for VIP seats.

In the “Perks” menu here, you have the option to select “Super Sellers” who have a track record for smooth transactions. This is a major advantage for us, adding a layer of reassurance to the buying experience.

At £40.80 each, these tickets from Vivid Seats were as cheap as we could find on any secondary marketplace.

Elsewhere, the established reseller Football Experience listed similar shortside seats at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys for £50, while seats in the same location were going for £66 on LiveFootballTickets.

Now we know that prices are dynamic on the secondary market and are determined by individual sellers. But in this case, the prices appear to be competitive on Vivid Seats—still, you do have to keep service fees in mind, as we’ll show a little later.

The stadium map above your ticket selection leaves you in no doubt about where you will be sitting in the stadium.

It’s also par for the course with football resale tickets that you will be purchasing seats in a vague area, and will only learn the row and seat number when the tickets arrive. So we had no misgivings about buying tickets without being aware of the exact location.

Something that speeds up the buying process with Vivid Seats is that you can make your purchase as a guest.

You can complete your registration after you buy your tickets, or not even register at all. The most important thing is that the site has an email address with which to contact you.

Unlike many football resale sites, Vivid Seats gives you the option to purchase with PayPal, which is a big plus.

Now, something unexpected at the end of the payment process is that we were billed in US dollars, despite the fact that GB Pounds were used for the listings and calculations at checkout.

Being regular users of resale football sites, we’re used to additional charges appearing at checkout and can shrug them off. However, Vivid Seats’ service fees are a bit of a gut punch, and only show up when you’re about to make your purchase.

In this case they were £14.03 per ticket, which works out at a 34.3% addition to the listed price, which was £40.80. Then you have to factor in the smaller Email Delivery charge, which came to £1.93 per ticket.

We know that service fees are a fact of life across all resale platforms. They are essential to keeping secondary marketplaces like Vivid Seats running.

The site also makes clear that it invests a lot of money into its security to ensure that buyers can purchase in full confidence, and you are reminded of the Buyer Guarantee before you check out.

Still, the fee hits hard at checkout and it’s something we have to address in our Vivid Seats review.

We checked a few other tickets for FC Barcelona matches on Vivid Seats, and found that the 34.3% applied to all of the listings we checked. However, the fees are known to fluctuate across the site, so it is not a flat rate.

While Vivid Seats is praised for its on-point customer service after you have made a purchase, there aren’t any email support options provided by the website if you have any doubts before you buy.

There’s a Live Chat option, which asks you for your order number, but you can call a UK-based helpline, open from 8 am to 12 pm.

After you make your purchase Vivid Seats’ full-service customer care will kick in, and you will receive any assistance you need via email or phone. In this aspect, the site shines and has earned a reputation for its swift and helpful responses.

Something that comes up often in the less positive reviews is that, like us, purchasers are caught by surprise at checkout when the site adds the service fees onto the total.

Many of the negative reviews also revolve around an inability for people to resell the tickets they bought on Vivid Seats. Now, if you find out that you can’t attend an event after making a purchase, Vivid Seats does give you the option of relisting the tickets as a seller to try to recoup what you paid.

However, this needs to be done several days before an event, because the site’s pre-vetting process, ensuring ticket authenticity, takes about 48 hours. Several dissatisfied buyers were unable to complete this process in time and were left out of pocket.

Another recurring issue is the finality of the ticket purchase, so refunds don’t apply if you simply can’t make the event. This is standard practice across all secondary market ticketing sites. The reality is that the onus is on the purchaser to be aware of the terms of their purchase so they don’t get caught out.

Now we’ve got the bad news out of the way, the overwhelming majority of buyers on Vivid Seats report a perfect experience. “Easy” and “convenient” are words that come up time and again.

Like us, users on Trustpilot praise the simplicity of the website, the ease of purchase, and the accessibility to events that have otherwise sold out.

A key factor is the availability of customer service representatives, either by email or phone, answering queries on all topics from discount codes to downloading apps so you can use your tickets. This human touch ensures a high level of trust, and a lot of happy customers.