Steep might actually be a bit of an understatement, how about extortionate transaction fees? That’s much more appropriate. And ‘Topic of the day’ might also be a bit short lived as I can’t see this problem going away in the near future.
But anyway, my friends and I bought some tickets to see The Cribs NME Awards Tour show at Brixton Academy this morning. The tickets go on general sale this Friday but we got a link to the pre-sale from the band’s website. The pre-sale tickets are only available through See Tickets, I assume there will be other ticket vendors to choose from when the tickets are available more widely on Friday.
So with no choice about where to get our tickets from I bought them through See Tickets. First of all I noticed the sneaky extra £2 they’re adding to EACH ticket’s price – with a much smaller face value price next to it – what is this £2 for if not the booking or transaction fee?
And once I’d put the two 2 tickets in my basket and got to the payment screen they wacked a HUGE £6 transaction fee on. Even when you buy one ticket the transaction fee is still £6! The small print explains that this ‘transaction fee’ covers the costs of processing the order, packing and delivering the tickets to you. In many cases it also covers the cost of producing your tickets. And this fee can also apply to tickets arranged for collection (?). The small print explains that the £2 charge on each ticket is the ‘booking fee’ that See Tickets add to the face value tickets so that they make “a little bit on top”, they could have mentioned that earlier!
Ticketlab’s advice on such things as transaction fees would be to shop around before purchasing tickets and try to avoid ticket providers like See, that charge unnecessarily extortionate fees that could be easily reduced if they offered the customer other ticket delivery methods, and maybe even offered e-tickets (it is the 21st Century don’t you know?), which would reduce around 80% of the transaction fee. It would also be nice if they were a bit more honest about the charges at the start of the transaction process.
Thanks See!