Ticketmaster - unfair charge. illegal?

gsakol

I purchased Usher tickets from TicketMaster for £97.50. A week later the show was cancelled so they sent me a refund through for £95.00.

Out of curiosity I asked about the remaining £2.50 and they said that in the T&C's it talks about a non refundable handling fee.

Surely this has to be illegal and they have to refund 100% of the money paid if THEY are the ones to cancel the order? Or is there a reason I am not a lawyer!?

Quentin

They are entitled to stick to their ts + cs which you will have agreed to.

And you are entitled to challenge them for being "unfair", but how much time/money you gonna waste over £2.50 trying to show this condition is "unfair"?

leonardcecil

The previous post is correct - I've just encountered the same situation (losing £5.55 for 2 tickets for a cancelled concert) through See tickets. I've been advised by the Citizens Advice/Trading Standards helpline, that if the T&Cs state a refund of charges and admin fees is not payable, then legally we have to accept this. The sums of money may not be huge for an individual consumer, but multiply these by a few thousand...heaven forbid the agency should ever lose out!
I had a worse situation a while ago when the date of an event as printed on my ticket had changed without me being notified. Ticketmaster then said they had sent me an email to advise - the date of the email being before the date when I ordered the tickets. They still refused to refund me on the basis that their T&Cs stated that it was up to me to verify the date advised was correct! Fortunately, my c.card company (Lloyds-TSB - well done) agreed to refund me, but I don't know if they would have charged back Ticketmaster.
It is like taking a faulty item back to a retailer and being told that because they have had the expense of stocking and selling it that the refund can only be for their cost price. Hiding unfair charges behind T&Cs also strikes me as akin to Martin's campaign against bank charges - if they say they're going to hit you in the face before they do it, is it then ok?
No doubt the ticket agencies will respond that they have still incurred costs, but this raises the bigger question again of why the price quoted for an event ticket is nearly always below what we actually have to pay.

Sharon87

I get why ticketmaster and seetickets still charge their booking fee as they still sent out the tickets and done their work, I just don't think the customer should fit the bill. The band or record company should really fit the bill if it was their decision to cancel.

I had this with Blink 182 when they cancelled a gig, I only got cost price of ticket back. It'll never happen, but in an ideal world, this is what should happen.