£8 fees on £30 tickets with Ticketmaster

MarkBargain

I bought two £15.00 theatre tickets this evening through Ticketmaster = £30.00. They added £5.00 'service charge' and then another £3.00 'Ticketfast' fee for me to print them on my own printer! (post and box office collection were the same price, so impossible to avoid).

I wish they just quoted £19.00 each for the tickets in the first place.

silvasava

Its really annoying as it puts the cost of going out up so much with all these 'hidden' charges. I HATE Ticketmaster but sometimes they're the only site you can use. Why do they charge for debit cards too??

korky69

proper scam,
i recently booked 2 tickets, £7 added to £70 tickets yet if i got the £40 it would have been £4
i'd love to hear why it costs £3 more for the booking, no extra work involved at all, they just add 10% no matter, and this was direct with the arena!

MamaMoo_2

I'm still peed off at being charged £2.50 just to have my tickets emailed to me, the same price as if the venue printed and posted them to me!

marywooyeah

it seems to be a standard 10% booking fee (10% off the face value) then a bit more for a "processing fee" then usually the postage is about £5.50. Its a lot but I go to a lot of gigs so just get used to the costs and view it as a total for the two tickets I usually get.

Chickabiddybex

I thought there was a new law about these charges brought in recently?

I've been to many gigs over the year and this is just getting worse. And it isn't just the added fees but the ticket cost too! It used to be £35 was expensive to see a band and now you can expect £65/70! So ridiculous. I think it is a combination of lower record sales plus higher amount of people going to gigs. They just make their money in a new way nowadays.

Reggie_Rebel

It's easy and quite right to be angered by Ticketmaster. I do think though that a portion of the blame should also lay with the artist/producer. If they wanted to they could insist that these fees are dropped or not use Ticketmaster

bod1467

I think the "new law" you're thinking of relates to payment processing charges, whereby they can only charge essentially what it costs them and not make any profit on that part. Ticketmaster et al are charging an Admin/handling fee, which is different and not covered by this law/guidance.

MarkBargain

bod1467 wrote: »

I think the "new law" you're thinking of relates to payment processing charges, whereby they can only charge essentially what it costs them and not make any profit on that part. Ticketmaster et al are charging an Admin/handling fee, which is different and not covered by this law/guidance.

Ryanair called theirs an 'admin fee' though and they had to change it.

The point is that the total price you pay is now shown at the beginning of the booking process.

Can someone tell me the difference between service charge and Ticketfast fee? Ticketfast sounds like a premium charge to get tickets by special delivery or something, but it just means they email the tickets. Normal post or box office collection are also £3.

CupOfChai

And they say it's touts that are the problem with ticket sales.

ThumbRemote

Chickabiddybex wrote: »

I thought there was a new law about these charges brought in recently?

I'm not sure it was law, but there was certainly a change whereby unavoidable fees had to be quoted in the 'headline' price. Hence the airlines in particular had to include fees and charges in their advertised price.

There's something on the Office of Fair Trading site about it, a rather long document, I assume there's a more concise summary somewhere though. http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/market-studies/AoP/OFT1291.pdf