Cancelled Event purchased through SEE Tickets?You may have been UNDER refunded

cozzer

Hi All

If you purchased tickets for an event through SEE Tickets and that event has been cancelled due to the Pandemic or otherwise, you may be due a further refund, as it appears now that SEE Tickets have been withholding a certain element of the booking fee, which should have been returned to the customer.

When some venues allocate tickets to agents, including SEE, the venue keeps a portion of the booking fee. This fee is passed on to the See customer, and is described sometimes as a "Venue Fee", "Facility Fee","Restoration Levy", or "Venue Levy". It can be anything from £0.30 to £2, depending on the venue. Generally, the bigger the venue, the higher the Venue Fee will be. It is built in to the booking fee and may look similar to this on your original booking email. Relevant part in bold text below:

 

1 x Stalls Standing	£56.25
Including booking fee (Booking fee includes Venue Fee - charged by the venue	£8.75 per ticket £1.50 per ticket)
Transaction Fee	£3.00
Total	£59.25

 

OR, if it is NOT listed on your booking email, you can double check to see if the venue receives a Venue Fee by checking a similar upcoming event at that venue on SEE Tickets. On the left hand side of the first booking page on the SEE Tickets website where you select the number of tickets you require, It will state if there is a Venue Fee in a box just under a photo of who is performing at the event. See text below for an example, this is taken from the following link 

https://www.seetickets.com/event/ozzy-osbourne-no-more-tours-2/the-o2-arena/1261713

"The O2 Arena, London

Monday 12 Jun 2023
Doors Open: 18:30
Starts: 19:30

Performing

Ozzy Osbourne

Please note the booking fee for this event includes a Venue Fee of £1.75 which is charged by the venue"

 

So, on a cancelled event, the venue would NOT bill SEE for the Venue Fee as the event never took place at the venue.

SEE tickets do not refund their portion of the booking fee to a customer for a cancelled event, but you would expect SEE to return the Venue fee to the customer, right, since the Venue isn't billing SEE for it?

No, in the case above, which details a booking I made with them in January 2020 for a recently cancelled charity event, SEE decided to keep the Venue Fee and not refund it to me. I made two complaints to SEE asking them to refund this to me. In the first response I was refused the refund of £1.50.

On the second enquiry, when I asked if the venue would receive the fee instead, or if they would donate it to the charity the event was for, they failed to respond at all.

So after giving them a few weeks to respond I decided to contact the venue directly.

The venue responded and assured me that they do not receive the Venue Fee on a cancelled event and confirmed that I should have been refunded this fee by SEE. They then contacted them on my behalf. Within 2 hours a refund of £1.50 was received from SEE.

In a time when many venues are struggling to stay afloat and many are closing down, it really takes the biscuit that SEE are potentially sitting on £££££££££ which doesn't belong to them.

On a side note, they did not refund the Transaction Fee either, which is supposedly for posting the tickets to me, which were never posted to customers of the cancelled event I booked for.

So, If you booked through SEE Tickets, were charged a Venue Fee on a cancelled event and have only received a face value ticket refund, please contact them and demand your Venue Fee refund. If you don't receive your Venue Fee refund, it is worth contacting the venue where the event was meant to take place directly as I'm pretty sure that the venues will not be aware that SEE are withholding this money.