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Ticketing firms agree to show fees up front

By | Published on Friday 31 January 2014

Which?

A number of UK ticketing firms have agreed to declare booking fees and commissions up front, rather than at the checkout stage of the ticket booking process, following the most recent ‘ticket commissions are evil’ campaign from consumer rights group Which?, according to The Guardian.

Ticketmaster, Ticket Web, See Tickets, Stargreen, BH Live Tickets, ATG Tickets and Ticket Soup have all promised to make extra fees much clearer from the moment ticket buyers land on their websites, so that there are no surprises at the final payment screen.

As previously reported, in its latest report on the issue Which? said that ticket prices sometimes increased by up to a third when extra fees are added at the end of a transaction. Which?’s Executive Director Richard Lloyd told The Telegraph that these last-minute increases left consumers feeling “ripped off” and showed a “lack of transparency”, making it harder for punters to make buying decisions before starting a purchase.

At the time of the Which? report, Ticketmaster refuted claims that its additional fees were “hidden” and insisted that it was upfront about how much tickets would cost. Though presumably the ticketing giant plans to now up the frontedness of that information. The seven agencies altering the way add-on fees are communicated are in part responding to a Which? petition that got 37,000 signatures after the magazine’s ticketing report. So that’s good.

Who knows, perhaps one day the live sector will think about selling tickets to its events at a fixed rate, covering all its costs with the actual declared ticket price, you know, like normal product and service sellers. Perhaps.



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