Event Tickets - Spurious Charges

FatCat

FatCat

Well-known member
I have been buying a lot of tickets for events lately and have noticed these two fees.

Booking Fees - have always been around but 11:50 on two tickets for the womens boxing and £17 for the Connor Benn fight.

We then get a bonus entry “Facility Fee” at 5:50 for the ladies boxing and about 8:50 for the Benn fight- which if I read up goes towards the venue. Forgive my ignorance but I had assumed the venue is taking a fair percentage of the ticket price from the organisers or have I got that wrong.

Regardless given that tickets are extortionate at the best of times how are these additional costs going unchecked and unchallenged?
 
I'm going to an event in a couple of weeks where my two £30 tickets cost £71, after they added 2x transaction fees (for one transaction?), 2x "Levy" (absolutely no idea what that is) and 1x postage (and they still haven't delivered them).
 
I thought it was bad enough already until I moved to the US. Everything seems to use Ticketmaster here and they're absolutely extracting the urine. I've seen additional fees of up to 50% of the ticket price. It's horrendous and yet there's no alternative other than miss the event.

And that's before you get to this dynamic pricing malarkey (aka sheer unchecked greed) which totally spoiled the ticket release for the upcoming Springsteen tour. Better get used to that nonsense, because it'll be rolled out across the board soon.
 
futureboy said:
I thought it was bad enough already until I moved to the US. Everything seems to use Ticketmaster here and they're absolutely extracting the urine. I've seen additional fees of up to 50% of the ticket price. It's horrendous and yet there's no alternative other than miss the event.

And that's before you get to this dynamic pricing malarkey (aka sheer unchecked greed) which totally spoiled the ticket release for the upcoming Springsteen tour. Better get used to that nonsense, because it'll be rolled out across the board soon.
Click to expand...
Yep, there was an excellent John Oliver segment on this recently. In the US Ticketmaster has sewn up both the first-hand and resale markets.

They will definitely look to do the same here and with our complete disregard for market regulation, we'll let them.

Incidentally, on the dynamic pricing point, I don't think it's all bad news - just need to have a "strategy" sometimes. I picked up a ticket for Nick Cave earlier in the year a day before the gig at half the original price. In my understanding it can work both ways, dependent on demand.

For events which will clearly sell out from the off it seems unfair though. Maybe it should only be introduced so many days/week after initial sale in that case, or after a % of tickets have been sold?
 
changingman said:
Yep, there was an excellent John Oliver segment on this recently. In the US Ticketmaster has sewn up both the first-hand and resale markets.

They will definitely look to do the same here and with our complete disregard for market regulation, we'll let them.

Incidentally, on the dynamic pricing point, I don't think it's all bad news - just need to have a "strategy" sometimes. I picked up a ticket for Nick Cave earlier in the year a day before the gig at half the original price. In my understanding it can work both ways, dependent on demand.

For events which will clearly sell out from the off it seems unfair though. Maybe it should only be introduced so many days/week after initial sale in that case, or after a % of tickets have been sold?
Click to expand...

Resale is a joke. It should be made criminal.
 
Processing fee
Attendance fee
Printing fee

I thought they were cutting down on this cowboy practice? Seems to be getting worse.
 
Totally agree. It's like Ticketmaster are running a criminal enterprise.
£1 to print your own ticket. What the fresh hell is all that about.
 
This ****'s been going on for years. Some of the extra charge means we're having to pay extra for actually getting the the ticket we've bought :) All part of our nice ongoing uncontrolled free market capitalism.
 
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