I have been thinking about the Ashes eBay thing. Getting the seat numbers is not that hard. All Cricket Australia needs to do is to buy a few tickets on eBay and cancel all the tickets that were bought at the same time by the same person. Hey, they can even make money on this since they get to resell the seats. But the real fund bit is CA not saying which tickets are cancelled. That means they do not need to cancel many tickets. They have just killed off eBay as a way to buy tickets for fear they may not be valid any more.

And provided that people believe that the tickets may not be valid, eBay is effectively killed off except for people who bought some tickets and then work out that they cannot attend. The fear factor of not knowing and not being able to verify is really strong I suspect. I think there will be some people who risk it, but in general I suspect that the prices are going to be kept way down. Very cunning plan. Of course such a plan relies on no-one working out that no tickets have been cancelled.

It should be fairly simple to work out by looking at the stats of purchases on eBay and correlating the bidders and winners of each auction who was buying for Cricket Australia. And you can then do other data matching. A heap of work but I am sure that it would make an interesting magazine or news paper article.

And before I close this post, it seems that Jetstar Asia is recruiting Flight Attendants from Thailand. This is not surprising as a way to reduce costs.