If a 7-year-old Shanghai boy could outwit the online selling system of Shanghai Disneyland by filling in details of four people to buy 20 tickets, it is small wonder that scalpers are having a heyday selling tickets up to 10 times the buying price.
China Daily reported that e-commerce platform Taobao and microblogging website Sina Weibo have postings of vendors selling their tickets to Shanghai Disneyland up to 10 times the original price. The regular price of a ticket is 370 yuan ($57), but a scalper is selling it for 580 yuan.
But that’s the regular ticket. For the grand opening period from June 16 to 30, the ticket is 499 yuan. A scalper from Shanghai named Li Zhenwei is selling it for 999 yuan on Taobao, the secondhand trading platform of Alibaba. Li said he and his wife purchased 10 tickets at Alitrip, an authorized ticket seller of Shanghai Disneyland.
One of the safeguards that the operators of the resort put in place was place a maximum of five tickets per buyer. Despite the limit, the Shanghai Disneyland website crashed on the first day of online ticket selling as Chinese deluged the portal with orders.
But in Weibo, the tickets could go as high as 3,899 yuan. The exorbitant ticket prices no longer surprises Liu Simin, deputy director of the China Society for Future Tourism Studies, because even in a communist country like China, the law of supply and demand applies. And as demand is high and supply is limited, prices naturally will go up.
As June 16 fast approaches, it is not just the ticket prices that are going up but also excited anticipation of the resort’s features and attractions. On Friday, images of three attractions were shared over social media which would further excite those who already bought tickets, whether at regular or exorbitant prices. These are photos of the Enchanted Storybook Castle, Fantasyland and Treasure Cove attractions, reported Insidethemagic.