Do ticket charges tick you off?

I would like to see a single price for purchasing a ticket. I don’t care about postage, self print, venue restoration charges, local tax etc. I want to compare (if possible) the price charged for the seat by a number of ticket suppliers and make my decision who to buy from on that basis.

I recently bought 2 tickets via Ticketmaster for a gig in December. The pricing seemed transparent at first: they were quoted as £28 + £3.55 charges but when I eventually got to the delivery options I was stung again.

As much as I agree it’s outrageous to pay to print off your own tickets, in this case I was given no option at all other than having to accept delivery by secure postage which was a further £5.50. Has that happened to anyone else?

I recently bought tickets to a Tesseract show for 3 people.

Despite 1 print out that admits 3, I was charged the booking fee 3 times.

This really ‘ticks’ me off as well. I have often been in the same situation as Alison, whereby I believe I know the price for my tickets and then get stung for the delivery. In many cases, I’ve been offered delivery to my home for the same price as printing them off – I’m not sure where the sense is in this. I absolutely think home printing should result in a discount.

Was going to book Cirque du Soleil tickets for Manchester show. They were £100 each AND Ticketmaster wanted £10.25 per ticket. I’ll do baht (as in ‘On Ikley Moor Baht ‘At’). It’s just obscene.

I recently wanted to buy a ticket for a gig I really didn’t want to miss, organised by the KiliLive company. They would in turn direct me to Eventim, which handled the ticket sale.

Eventim would charge me 2 pounds to…print my ticket with my paper, ink and on my printer. This on top of the 2.50 pounds of card handling fee.

While asking KiliLive by email, they didn’t even bother answering. Finding this profoundly unjust, I eventually just ditched the show.

But to be honest, even your question doesn’t go to the heart of the issue. The problem is not whether or not the unreasonable charge should be quoted separately. The question is: should the company offer a reason on their page why the “print-it-yourself” charge is applied at all? I’d be curious to see how they phrase this..

If I buy something I want to know how much it will cost me, not the price minus compulsory costs. It’s just a misleading con. If they carry on with these types of practices soon wheels will be optional extras when buying cars.

What I find particularly annoying is venues who add an administration charge for tickets that they are selling direct. Sadlers Wells have been doing this for years.

I went to see Greg Davies in Nottingham last night (he was excellent). I booked my tickets in March through Ticketmaster, paid £2.50 standard postage, and yet ended up picking the tickets up from the Box Office an hour before the gig because of “time constraints”. They had 7 months to put 2 pieces of paper in an envelope and send them to me for a lot more than the price of a 1st class stamp, but ran out of time on this mission?

Thanks Patrick. That’s the one.

I booked 4 £20 tickets with Ticketmaster and was charged £3.50 per ticket booking fee AND in additon, I was also charged £2 to collect the tickets from the venue on the night! Absolutely outrageous…£80 tickets and £16 fee which equates to 20% of the total ticket price. Something really needs to be done about this…

I agree with Ian above – I want to know what I am being charged for.
I don’t mind paying a sensible per-transaction (NOT ‘per ticket’) charge, but charging to print my own tickets is just a rip-off .. an example of how a (near) monopoly (in this case Ticketmaster) can hold its market hostage.
It has modified my behaviour. Now when I buy tickets from places such as the National Gallery I don’t include any donation or other charitable uplift. I’d like the National Gallery to use its heft to put a stop to these charges.

I have just bought tickets for Twelfth Night at the Apollo theatre, the theatre website sent me to Encore Tickets to book the seats. Each seat had a £7 booking fee!!

The booking fees are way out of control – theatre booking fees used to be about £1.50 how are now so high.

When last buying tickets in person over the counter at the Malvern Theatres, I was charged a handling fee. This does not happen when I buy a newspaper.
Disgusting!

Just bought tickets online for a Moody Blues concert. Advertised price: £29.50 per ticket. Actual price: £36.40 per ticket. 23% higher than the advertised price. The difference? £5.50 per ticket ‘booking fee’ plus £2.81 ‘transaction fee’ for paying by card (the only payment option offered).

And this was by far the best deal available: other sellers were charging even higher booking fees, including the venue’s own ‘s box office to customers who went to buy in person!

The agent I bought from also tried to sell me ‘cancellation insurance’ so I’d get a refund if the performance was cancelled. But their own terms and conditions say I would get a refund (of the ticket face value) if this happened anyway.

This all seems contrary to the priciples of pricing transparency enshrined in the OFT’s Consumer Protection Regulations. The sad thing is that if consumers decide to rebel and say ‘I’m not paying’ it will result in theatres and concert venues going out of business. Why is making people feel ripped off good for the business?

Just been ripped off again, this time by Brighton Dome, who are charging a ‘transaction fee’ PER TICKET. Transaction fees are supposed to be per transaction.

The transaction fee only applied if you paid by card. But it amounted to 10% of the ticket price. Credit card processing fees are actually only 2-3% of the total transaction value, debit card fees even less.

Brighton Dome is owned by the local authority, so maybe they see this as a way of making much needed cash out of people who can afford to go to a concert. But why not be honest about it?

Looks like Ticket Master is the rogue in this case.
My first reaction was that it must be a result of out-sourcing, whereby a service provider needs/sees a way to maximise its own income when contracted to an event provider. Did you look into this? TJN.

I paid Ticketmaster in October 2012 for a concert next year. I chose to pay to be able to print off the tickets as a couple of years ago Ticketmaster failed to post tickets I bought from them and I had to stand in a queue (for Paul Mccartney in Cardiff) with hundreds of others to be handed the ticket. There was no appology from Ticketmaster with them blaming the show organiser.
After paying for Ticketfast in October and going to print off the tickets the system does not let me saying that this was not possible at the moment. I have now waited weeks and even sent Ticketmaster an email question asking why I could not print off the tickest. Their answer is that the concert promoter has not yet released access. What are we paying for?

i have just bought some tickets from my local odeon cinema, and i had to pay 0.75p per ticket, why is it not on the one transcation why both tickets as they only take one payment.

One quick mention on the flip side is that a friend and I recently booked a bunch of tickets for 6 matches in the Rugby League World Cup and were pleasantly surprised to “only” have to pay one booking charge on the order. Previous experience had (perhaps telling) led us to steel ourselves for one booking charge per ticket, which is outrageous yet not uncommon in online booking (Vue Cinemas, for instance).

What I would like to know given the constant “tick off” of ticket buyers, and that is putting it politely, is what is WHICH going to do to help try change this?

VUE cinema at Westfield charges .75 pence per ticket. All VUE cinema tickets have to be done electronically these days so VUE is making an additional profit per ticket on already quite high admission prices.

Twice in two days I have come across this “Fulfilment charge” when purchasing tickets. In the latest case, I emailed the company selling the tickets for clarification and received a rather bizarre email, that I think was possible meant for someone internal in the company or if it was for me didn’t even address my query. Is there any where we can offical lodge our complaints about these charges?

COMMON EXPLANATION – We charge a fulfilment fee to contribute towards the cost of delivering our tickets to you, whether it is through the post, electronically or collecting at the venue. This fee is a one-off charge that covers the processing and delivery of the entire order, not each ticket.

The fulfilment fee is charged to help contribute towards other operational costs and overheads associated with ticket fulfilment e.g. ticket stock administration and inventory control, ticket stock/stationery, collection facilities and postage and/or packaging costs if it applies to the event.

The fulfilment fee will not be payable if a ticket is purchased and collected at the box office at the same time.