steveben53

I have been looking to book a couple of tickets to see a play in London. The face value of the tickets is £65 each but over and above that is an £8.50 booking fee.

Personally I find this infuriating, especially if, when trying to book direct with the theatre box office, you get directed to one of these ticket agencies.

Does the same happen in other places when trying to book theatre tickets or is this a problem limited to London ?

cblaisd

With the permission of one of the Travel Buzz moderators, I will move this to that forum.

cblaisd
Co-Moderator, Dining Buzz

Ocn Vw 1K

I had this situation arise yesterday, when seeking to book a play for our annual Spring NYC trip. The "official" website for the play directed me to another website which was a ticket brokerage with a convenience fee.

However, this practice of adding convenience fees is not limited to cases when a box office or theatre refers one to a ticket broker website. It's common in at least North America for box offices to themselves add a convenience fee for any orders booked with the box office via phone or email. This also happens when booking music or dance concerts. The only way to generally avoid such a fee is to book by personal appearance at the box office.

silver-tls

I had a rather unpleasant experience in the UK a few years ago. Asked the hotel concierge to book tickets to a broadway show for that evening. Show was not sold out but I didn't have time to book them myself so figured hotel would charge a small fee. Turns out the concierge used a ticket broker who marked up the tickets by 50%!!!

I asked for orchestra seats and they said the ticket broker had a special relationship with them to provide them with the best last minute availability. They pointed out in the fine print they exclusively use this ticket broker and guest accepts surcharges up to 200% of face value. I understand this might be the case for hot shows that sell out on a nightly basis but for a resident musical? I complained to the GM and basically told to pound sand.

fairviewroad

Kind of like buying a Spirit Airlines ticket.

Ocn Vw 1K

Or the opposite result of booking a ticket on the large, legacy airlines where booking on the airline website incurs no service fee, but booking in person or on the phone with an agent does, unless one has a sufficiently high elite status.

TravelerMSY

Welcome to the world of outsourcing. In exchange for not having much of a box office or any IT staff to manage the reservations system- everything gets taken care of by Ticketmaster, et. al. at the patron's expense. At many of them you can't even buy tickets from them directly to avoid the fees.

And you might ask "Why don't they just raise the price of the ticket $10?" It's because then they would have to share a % of the entire transaction with the performers.

sethb

Even that doesn't always work. Some theaters hire TicketB.st.rd to run their box offices.

caverunner17

Also never understood the BS $2.50 print at home fee. Seriously? It's creating a PDF...

ou81two

Why would you pay to deal with any company like that. There's lots to do in London without having to pay for something like that.

steveben53

Because I would rather like to see the play - thats why

Badenoch

It's also common for many North American sporting events where the only way to avoid a convenience fee is to buy tickets at the gate.

In London I prefer to buy tickets at the theatre if I have the time. It allows me to find out where the theatre is and sometimes even see inside to determine where I want to sit.

milepig

You know, it is what it is. If the ticket is $50 and the fee is $6.50, the cost of the ticket to me is $56.50. I decide on value based on that and either complete the purchase or find something else to do. It isn't like I get a surprise when the credit card bill comes. @:-)

I hate it as much as resort fees, but there's little I can do to change the situation.

pinniped

If it's an in-demand show with high enough junk fees to get my attention, I just buy the tickets from the box office. Certainly done it in London a few times...

If it's *not* an in-demand show, then I'm more likely to use Stubhub for most kinds of events or, for Broadway or London theatre, the TKTS kiosks.

The one place where my approach fails is a theatre performance that is *so* in-demand that there's either a box office queue or a 100% sellout for weeks/months in advance, yet not enough secondary market volume to regularly turn up in large quantities in places like Stubhub. The only way in is via a scalper at a big premium. In that case, my answer is usually to simply not go...I'm fine waiting a year or two to see the show. It eventually becomes accessible at whatever value I place on that particular performance.