ORGANISERS of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo have urged fans to avoid being ripped off by ticket touts.
The warnings come after people have repeatedly turned up to the event with fake entrance tickets.
And it has also emerged that hundreds of tickets for the event are being sold online for excessive sums despite the official box office still selling tickets for its three-week run.
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Around 96 per cent of the 220,000 tickets available for this year’s tattoo were sold before the opening night last Thursday.
But the event’s official website is still selling tickets for performances this week.
Public sale tickets for the tattoo – a sell-out for the past 17 years – have been priced between £25 and £70 this year, but on unofficial ticketing sites the prices can be as much as £300.
The cheapest available tickets on the Get Me In site for this Saturday’s performance are priced at £132.
Brigadier David Allfrey, chief executive of the event, said efforts to keep the Tattoo affordable were being undermined.
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And he warned anyone who buys a ticket through an unofficial site could be turned away from the event if their tickets are fake.
He said: “We absolutely don’t want to work with any of these websites. I’m not impressed with them at all. Most of them are pursuing legal loopholes in the industry.
“People should only come to the authentic Tattoo website. These tickets might not actually exist.
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“We have people turning up with fake tickets often enough for it to be a concern for us.”
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