Resceduled concert eventim rip off

fitchy

The Andrea Bocelli concert that I was booked for (since March) has just been rescheduled to a date when I am on holiday. Eventim will only refund ticket price not the £9 per ticket booking fee.
I feel very ripped off as they will now sell the seats again and charge another booking fee.
This is profiteering from the disappointment of their customers & I think completely unacceptable.
What do others think?

p00hsticks

Personally I don't agree with 'per ticket' booking fees at all as, other than the small cost of physically printing the ticket, (unless you're paying by credit card) I can't see how it actually costs more to sell four tickets to someone than it does to sell one - it's one card transaction, one sales clerk, one postage cost etc.....

and £9 a ticket is exhorbitant ! I don't think I've come across one as high as that before.

However, I guess the booking agency would say that as well as having already provided you with the service of processing your payment and issuing you with the tickets in the first place, in the case of a concert being rescheduled then they are then having to do even more work in arranging to issue refunds and re-issue tickets - so why should they be expected to do it for nothing ?

shaun_from_Africa

The OFT are of the opinion that it is unfair not to have all booking fees refunded when an event is cancelled and if you had multiple tickets, it might be worth legal action to try and get a refund but it's probably not worth considering if you only had 1 or two.

http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/reports/unfair_contract_terms/oft667.pdf

6.10 Where fairness requires a refund of the face value of a
ticket (for example on cancellation, rescheduling or a
material change) any booking fees charged should also be refunded.

6.11 Who is legally responsible or providing or obtaining the
refund of the booking fee in such cases will depend on all
the circumstances of that and any related contracts.

6.12 As suppliers generally, including ticket agencies and event promoters etc, are in a better position to insure against these losses; we consider it unfair that the consumer should bear them.

Valli

Thanks for that Shaun; I have never come across the OFT advice/guidance before and I have looked.

I've posted on a few threads where this has come up - at one point I had a link to a Direct Gov page which has since been taken down which detailed a promoter's obligation to a client in the event of a cancellation/reschedule.

On the last link I found it said (basically and I paraphrase) that the refunding of booking fees for rescheduled events is at the discretion of the promoter/seller. -

http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/problem/can-i-get-a-refund-on-my-ticket-/

So, OP, to answer your question -

given that booking fees are applied PER TICKET and not per booking (typically) I think it's high time these T&Cs and regulations were revised; I personally would like to see a booking fee (or handling charge) applied per booking and not per ticket and I would like all promoters to be obliged to refund face value + booking fee if they reorganise, reschedule or cancel an event.

Might be worth a Letter Before Action given the OFT's guidance!

(In fact IIRC in the last similar thread on which I posted a troll appeared who seemed to think that the promoter need not refund the ticket price AT ALL since the concert was still going ahead, albeit on a different date! - for that reason I won't link to that thread.)