Merry Christmas: Tickets are $650. And you can scalp them.

The Jackedrabbit has spoken once more, bringing glad tidings of tickets. Were Burners naughty or nice? Did they get what they wanted for Christmas from the BMOrg – ie. tickets linked to IDs and no more lottery? Read on…

we don’t know yet what Black Rock City’s allowable peak population for 2013 will be. Some of the details of agreements that impact that number have not yet been finalized, which means we don’t have enough data to determine precisely how many tickets will be sold and at what price. We are working hard to get our permits and agreements in place, and will be announcing the full ticket plan on Friday January 4, 2013.

Hmmm…”full ticket plan”. Do they mean “pricing tiers”? What more do they have in store for us?

We know you’re super curious about some big questions, and we’d like to put your mind at ease about a few things right now: tickets will be sold first-come first-served — that’s right, no lottery.

woo-hoo!

Secondly, purchasing tickets will require pre-registration so that we can weed out known scalpers beforehand. We’ll offer a robust Low Income Ticket Program, as we have in the past, and we’re bringing back the Secure Ticket Exchange Program (STEP) to facilitate the safe, hassle-free exchange of tickets between people in the aftermarket.

So STEP comes back, giving BMOrg an additional royalty-type revenue stream from secondary market sales; and poor people still get a look in. “Pre-registration” sounded a bit like linking tickets to IDs to me, but no…

We will not be implementing identity-based ticketing (e.g. name-on-ticket) … for more information, see this blog post from Larry Harvey: http://blog.burningman.com/?p=23887.

What they really mean by pre-registration is “we are still having a process where you have to register to be eligible to buy tickets”. Very unfortunately similar to the ticket lottery system. And, like last year where a bunch of insiders had a chance to buy “early release” tickets for $420, then sell them for 100%+ profits on the secondary market, we’re having another “early bird” sale. The price this time? A whopping $650. Get ready for a major ticket price hike across the board in 2013.

Early-birds can participate in our Holiday Sale, which allows folks to buy tickets in time for holiday gifting. PLEASE NOTE: Holiday Sale tickets are priced dramatically higher than our regular tickets will be and Black Rock City, LLC will donate 3% of the price of each ticket sold during this early Holiday Sale to the Burning Man Project, a new nonprofit dedicated to spreading Burning Man culture around the world. (In addition, Black Rock City, LLC makes other substantial contributions throughout the year to support the Burning Man Project, including contributing the proceeds from fundraising events and many other forms of support.)

So … here are the details:

– 3000 tickets will be offered at $650 each for the Holiday Sale.
– In order to participate in this sale, you must pre-register at:
http://tickets.burningman.com/registration-holiday2013.html
– Registration is open NOW and will close at noon PST on Wednesday December 19th.
– Those pre-registered will be able to participate in the first-come first-served sale on Thursday December 20th, starting at noon PST.
– You may purchase a maximum of 4 tickets per person.
– These tickets are not eligible for STEP, but are transferable (you are welcome to resell them on your own, if you wish).
– The only payment types accepted are Mastercard or Visa credit cards, or debit cards with either the Visa or Mastercard symbols. If you don’t have one of these cards, you will need to obtain a one-time use card.
– Physical tickets will be shipped between June 1 and July 15, unless you opt for pick-up at Will Call in Black Rock City.

Black Rock City, LLC is donating 3% of these tickets to the Burning Man Project? Sounds like a nice tax write-off for them. And the left hand is so generous that it provides even more tax-deductible “substantial contributions” to the right hand, from off-Playa fundraising activities during the year. “You can feel good about paying us this $650, because we’re giving $20 of it to another company we control”. But wasn’t the Burning Man Project supposed to be taking over all of the revenues and operations?