Scarlet Mist www.scarletmist.com

The whole thing's based on a gentlemen's agreement between the seller and buyer and is a wonderfully civilised way of being able to sell on your ticket to someone who wants it. The site deserves to be better known.

Such a great site. I have used it twice to sell tickets that some of my more useless friends have left me with. Both times it has worked very well, once meeting at the gig (just remember to organise to meet somewhere that you get mobile reception) and once several days before. I wish more people would use this site.

Scarlet Mist is a site set up by fans for fans for the ethical exchange of gig tickets. The premise is thus: You buy a couple of tickets to a show and find out a few weeks later you can't make it. Rather than eating the cost and losing money or doing something highly unethical and touting them to people who are desperate on eBay you advertise them on Scarlet Mist. You are then put in contact with someone who wants to buy them at face value (the ticket price + service charge + shipping that you paid initially). You can then arrange to meet up or send them. Scarlet Mist offers an escrow service if you need to be paid via the internet/ship the tickets if you can't meet up.

If you want tickets to a gig or event, you can go looking through anything that's available or register your interest. If you find tickets you want to purchase, you can contact the seller directly.

They usually have a pretty good range of tickets, and the range is growing as more people become aware of the service and more people are fed up with touting and touts getting half the tickets for any popular show/tour. I've never bought tickets via Scarlet Mist because I've been very lucky (and tend to go to smaller, less popular gigs), but we have sold tickets via Scarlet Mist on a couple of occasions. In both instances we arranged to meet up locally with the buyer and everything went well. Hopefully the buyer was happy cause he had tickets to a sold out gig. We were happy because the tickets in question would have gone to waste otherwise. In the second instance, we had one spare ticket at the last minute (the day before the gig) and still managed to sell it, meeting up with the buyer at the gig on the way in.

So, if you don't get tickets to see your favourite band, don't spent 4x the face value to buy a ticket off some unethical nasty on an auction site, check Scarlet Mist and keep checking til you get what you want!