Resale of Glastonbury tickets starts today. But how much do they cost? The answer is almost definitely ‘more than the advertised price’ thanks to extra booking fees. How can festival ticket sellers justify it?
I’m a big fan of summer festivals, even when it pours with rain. But the cost of going to the likes of Glastonbury, Reading or Bestival can all add up. Transport, programmes, food – and if you aren’t used to the outdoors life, you’ll probably have to fork out for a tent and some wellies too.
What’s more, the ticket fees are getting more and more bizarre each year. If you want the privilege of buying a ticket from one of the official sellers or resellers, ‘admin charges’ and ‘booking fees’ will be added to your ticket.
Festival ticket costs – I’ve done the maths
My £170 ticket for this year’s Latitude Festival actually cost £186.25 through Seetickets. That’s after factoring in a ‘booking fee’ of £7, a separate £5.25 ‘transaction fee’ and the not-quite-compulsory-but-automatically-added ‘refund protection’ for £4.
Glastonbury tickets will set you back £195, but the booking fees will take the total to £200, and postage and packaging is £4.95 per ticket. If you want to buy Bestival tickets, you need to budget a whopping £10 on top of the actual ticket price. And most vendors will charge double the booking fee for two tickets, triple for three, etc.
Surcharges vs booking fees
We’ve been exposing unfair card surcharges recently, and rightly so – we can see the discrepancy between how much a company charges and how much they actually pay to the banks for a card transaction. With your help we’ve been putting pressure on Consumer Minister, Ed Davey MP, to get unfair surcharges banned.
But a booking fee is a bit different, because it’s harder to work out whether it’s reasonable. Do they really do a fiver’s worth of work for each ticket they flog?
If I paid someone to sit in a room taking cheques from eager festival-goers and stuffing tickets into envelopes it’d cost me less in wages than £5 a ticket. So why does it cost more through a streamlined, automated online service?
It’s all part of the service
I’m not expecting a free service, but the ticket sellers aren’t really providing a service to me – they’re providing one to the organisers. They’re making them money by distributing their tickets. Surely it makes more sense for the costs to be passed on via the organisers (and a higher upfront ticket price) than for them to slap a £5 charge on the privilege of giving them £170?
It surprises me more as festival organisers are increasingly keen to appear ethical, green, open and honest – almost as if they’re not run by companies trying to make a profit! So here’s my two-step plan to make the whole transaction even more ethical:
- Ticket sellers (and resellers) should stop charging excessive ‘booking’, ‘admin’ and ‘transaction’ fees.
- Festival organisers should factor in the cost of ticket sales when setting their prices.
What do you think? Are booking fees an acceptable extra, or should ticket booking all be part of the service, and therefore the ticket price? Luckily for you, Which Conversation is an all-inclusive package, so it won’t cost you anything to leave a comment below.
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