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Event Cancellation - Heritage Live
Comments
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In a word no. As above. The booking fee is for work that has been done.
Life in the slow lane0 -
Whatabout car parking fees that they are wanting to keep too?
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That would depend upon the nature of the contract. If parking was a separate contract, then it wouldn't normally be automatically refundable.
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If you have a break down of cost for parking & proof that the parking is not available then you might have a chance. But might have to wait till day after event.
Life in the slow lane0 -
So it would have been better if they'd refused to pay out completely and then I could have done a chargeback.
Splitting purchases like this into bits - booking fees, transaction fees, service fees, etc etc should be banned.
Imagine if Sainsbury's did it.
Transaction fee, cashier fee, delivery fee, stocking fee, service charges - then maybe an optional 15% tip when you hand over your card.
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Booking fee is for the work a 3rd party does to process payment & handle ticket distribution.
Life in the slow lane0 -
An £18 booking fee isn't. Printing and posting a ticket doesn't cost anywhere near that much.
A large chunk of that fee will be going back to one or more of the promoters, artists and venue as additional revenue. It's a way of quietly inflating the cost of the ticket while moving all the hate onto the greedy booking company, when the customer has no choice over who they book through.
If it sticks, force it.
If it breaks, well it wasn't working right anyway.0 -
Do you think the severs, back end systems cost nothing & the staff required?
It's not just the cost of the tickets.
Life in the slow lane0 -
I assume such tickets are "non refundable", if such I don't see any reason the extra fees should not be refunded by the party that has breached the contact, I would say the loss stems naturally from the breach and is foreseeable, don't know if there is any loss of enjoyment to claim with such things.
@A_Geordie might have something to say.
In the game of chess you can never let your adversary see your pieces1 -
Claiming a refund via a charge back will depend on the contract terms. If the terms state that booking fees are non-refundable then you're going to be out of luck with that. Worth a shot but don't hold out much hope.
The other option is to either issue legal proceedings against Heritage Live directly, or the third party ticket provider. The answer on whether booking fees are refundable depends on which side of the fence you ask. Promoters, ticket agents and anyone on the events side will tell you that they do not refund booking fees, and usually the argument is something along the lines of:
We processed the transaction and we incurred those fees with the payment processing provider and those are non-refundable so we will not refund you.
That is, as far as I'm aware, an industry standard policy position and is at the discretion of the individual companies/persons who might offer a refund of those booking fees.
On the other side of the fence, consumers will often say that the event was cancelled not through their choice and outside of their control, so the booking fees should be refunded and they should be refunded. The agent should look to the third party to recover those losses.
Ticket events are classified as a service for consumer rights purposes and unlike goods or digital content where you are entitled to a refund of sums you paid under the contract which would obviously include booking fees, the Consumer Rights Act says consumers are only entitled to a price reduction, up to 100% and this is where ticket sellers/agents try to take advantage of that wording.
One way you can argue this against the ticket seller:
The booking fees formed part of the contract price because they were an unavoidable fee that needed to be paid in order to secure the booking and receive the tickets. Therefore the booking fees form part of the actual ticket price rather than separately treated. I'm not aware of any consumer rights case on this point for ticket events, but I am 80%-90% certain there was an airline compensation case under the EU261 passenger rights law that effectively stated this position when consumers used travel agents and were not refunded booking or other one off fees. This case could be used as an analogy and if I find the case name, I'll update the post and add it here.
You could try to pursue Heritage Live directly with this argument:
The Consumer Rights Act does not prevent a consumer from seeking other remedies as damages for loss. The consumer would have to argue that the term which refuses a refund of the booking fee is unfair. Reasons as to the unfairness might be that:
(a) Heritage Live failed to provide the event and cancelled it and the third party contracting provider should not benefit from that breach by placing the consequences at the consumer's door when they are in a much stronger position to soak up the loss and/or recover the money against Heritage Live
(b) The allocation of risk is one sided in that if a consumer called the event, they would lose their money and if Heritage Live cancelled the event, they still lose their money. This creates a significant and inherently unfair imbalance.
(c) Selling events involves an element of commercial risk where things might go wrong such as poor ticket sales, loss of venue, weather etc. and those risks are ultimately business risks, not consumer ones. Heritage Live assumed the risk when organising this event and passing that risk onto the consumer is inherently unfair.
(d) The consumer never cancelled, it was Heritage Live and a consumer should not be left out of pocket for something that they did not cause or control. Heritage Live should (or ought to) have insurance to cover for these types of situations rather than passing the buck to the consumer to take up insurance (a bit like the parcel delivery arguments regularly seen on this forum).
I can't really say with any certainty how successful these arguments would be, but they are reasonable ones to make. I will say that issuing legal proceedings for £18 might be considered by the court as a trivial matter and not representative of a court's resources or time, so there is discretion that a court might strike it out on that basis. I have personally never seen a claim struck out for being too low value, but I have seen claims issued in the region of £25 that were not struck out - something to bear in mind as well as the time and effort of going through that process. In those cases the courts will no doubt encourage parties to try and settle the matter, or even order the parties to undertake mediation at a shared cost.
That £18 loss could be increased as suggested by @the_lunatic_is_in_my_head for loss of enjoyment but that's only going to be a really modest amount, maybe £50 and I would think anything beyond £100 is likely to be excessive. But taken together, the claim value would increase to take it out of the question as being too trivial/low value claim.
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