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While some people are perfectly happy to pay £400 to watch a handful pensioners playing songs from the 1960s, there’s one ticketing scam that still seems particularly mean — charging us “delivery fees” even when we’re printing out emailed digital copies of tickets.
Companies like Ticketmaster charge £2.75 for its Ticketfast delivery service, a way of letting buyers instantly print their own tickets for scanning and validation at the door. But given how expensive bloody printer ink is, and the fact Ticketmaster’s saving money on posting actual tickets out to customers, surely we ought to be getting discounts for printing our own tickets?
Ticketmaster says the fee is put toward staffing venue doors to make sure there are enough people to “read and validate the tickets” bought online, but surely those people would be milling about the venues anyway? [Which?]
Image credit: Ticket Maker
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Nope, I think it’s ridiculous. It’s like charging more for ebooks. Totally absurd.
totally agree we are the ones spending the money to print the tickets, so why should we have to pay for that, they are saving money and they will send you a confirmation email about your order, so they can’t say they are doing more work by emailing the tickets to you
Ebooks attract VAT whereas physical books don’t. It is annoying, and I have no doubt some publishers and retailers make the most of that fact, but it’s not all their fault.
Have you seen the admin fee’s for the Rolling Stones concerts?
£400 ticket and £35 admin fee per ticket.
Its all a big con, and the sooner they are investigated fir this the better.
THIRTY FIVE QUID?! That’s astonishing.
Side-note: I’m still crying into my sleeve that I couldn’t get tickets to see them this morning.
Kat, did you get a Glasto ticket. They are bound to be headlining there next year.
If the Stones; The Smiths, and Fleetwood Mac all really *do* end up headlining, I’ll definitely jump the fence for that!
Holy Mosses. Do you get a gold disc with every ticket or something?
Ryanair have been charging for both online check-in and airport check-in for ages.
Doesn’t mean it’s right.
Nope, but Ryanair and Ticketmaster are in the same league of rip-you-off-with-hidden-charges companies.
There’s plenty of these little things that companies do that are not right but somehow we have to put up with it. For example insurance companies charging you a £5 admin fee when you move houses. They dont even send you a new certificate, they update their records and expect you to print it yourself.
Oh, really?! Phew, thanks for that clarification Sam. I wasn’t merely highlighting it as another example, and before reading your comment, I almost concluded that their actions were entirely correct and proper, but you’ve really helped me understand that charging customers for something they have to do in order to make use of the service they’ve just purchased does not fall into that category.
You’re very welcome
‘Tis especially bad when it costs the same amount to get the tickets posted.
Ticketmaster are con artists anyway, avoid them as much as possible. They are sub-human scum.
Admin fees in general are a rip off.
If it wasn’t for made up charges like these they’d just slap the charges on somewhere else. Admin fees etc…
At least this way we can see that we’re dealing with diseased turds.
“Ticketmaster says the fee is put toward staffing venue doors to make sure there are enough people to “read and validate the tickets” bought online, but surely those people would be milling about the venues anyway? ”
Errr… surely they need the same amount of people to read and validate the tickets they print? The number of people with tickets hasn’t changed… whoever prints them.
I have this same beef with National Express coaches. I have to spend my time entering my details, printing my ticket and they have the cheek to charge me a £1 booking fee… I mean seriously – I could understand a charge if I called them up and someone else had to type in anything, but not when I do it for them!
“surely they need the same amount of people to read and validate the tickets they print? The number of people with tickets hasn’t changed”
^^ Actually that statement just emphasises their point.
However am i deluded for thinking that the venues pay their own staff to manage all that out of the profits they get from hosting the gig in the first place? I have worked at venues and of course been to them and never seen a crack team of ticket master door staff to this day…
You should try being both a customer of and a supplier to BT.
Unless you pay by DD they charge you when you pay your phone bill, and when our company bills them, they make us buy credits for an online invoicing system so that we can send them an invoice that they’ll take 90 days to pay.
I have solved this problem a long time ago. Don’t go to concerts, over crowded, over priced and more often than not underwhelming.