Taylor Swift Fan Sues StubHub, Says Her $14K Eras Tour Tickets Were Swapped For ‘Inferior’ Seats

An angry Taylor Swift fan has filed a class action lawsuit against StubHub over allegations that the company refuses to honor its “FanProtect Guarantee,” leaving her with clearly “inferior” seats after she dropped $14,000 on Eras Tour tickets.

Despite StubHub’s promise, Alexis Christensen says that her pricy tickets to Swift’s December show in Vancouver were suddenly voided on the day of the concert – and that the platform offered her only a “sharply angled side view of the stage” as a replacement.

Those new tickets were worth only $3,600, Christensen says, and StubHub “pocketed the difference.”

“With less than forty minutes until the once-in-a-lifetime concert began, and with no alternative option or recourse provided by the defendant, Ms. Christensen was forced to use the inferior tickets that StubHub provided,” her attorneys write in the lawsuit, which was obtained by Billboard. “StubHub exploits the consumer’s lack of alternatives and coerces them into using tickets that are significantly less valuable than those they purchased.”

Christensen’s case is the latest legal battle driven by the infamously pricey market for Swift’s tour, which wrapped in December with a record-shattering haul of more than $2 billion in face-value ticket sales over a two-year run. Numerous fans filed class actions against Ticketmaster, and the Federal Trade Commission is suing an Eras re-seller who jacked up prices. Prosecutors in New York even filed criminal cases against a “cybercrime crew” that stole Eras tickets and resold them at a huge profit.

StubHub’s FanProtect Guarantee promises buyers that tickets they buy on the platform are valid; if not, the company promises to “find you comparable or better tickets to the event” or offer a refund or credit. But the fine print is more nuanced: the meaning of “comparable or better” is decided at StubHub’s “sole discretion,” based on “cost, quality, availability and other factors.”

In her complaint, Christensen says her three replacement tickets were hardly “comparable” – and in fact were “significantly worse.” She says her original $14,000 seats were located in BC Place Stadium’s Section 249, directly in front of the stage, while the replacements were located in Section 218, almost parallel with the stage and with a bad view of Swift on the tour’s long catwalk stage.

“In Section 249, the plaintiff would have had a full view of the stage, including the runway reaching from the main stage out onto the concert floor,” her lawyers say, including side-by-side images of the two vantage points. “In Section 218, the plaintiff only had a sharply angled side view of the main stage, and a rear view whenever the runway was in use.”

And Christensen’s lawyers say she’s not the only one to be duped by the FanProtect Guarantee. They say StubHub uses it to convince consumers to use the platform, but “routinely and knowingly provides inferior tickets” or “refuses to offer refunds.” By providing lesser replacements, the lawsuit claims the company is “able to pocket the difference in value and further profit from this fraudulent scheme.”

Filed as a proposed class action, the lawsuit seeks to represent “hundreds of thousands if not millions” people who the attorneys claim have faced similar treatment: “Despite its representations, StubHub regularly declines to honor its FanProtect Guarantee.”

In technical terms, the lawsuit accuses StubHub of violating Washington state’s consumer protection law as well as a variety of other forms of legal wrongdoing, including making intentional misrepresentations to buyers and fraudulently inducing fans to buy tickets.

A spokesperson for StubHub did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.