Wooooooooo yeah tonight I'm off to the far reaches of outer Mongolia....(aka Greenwich in SE London) to see Mr Scruff at Matter. I'm excited like a small goat in a herd of other goats because past experience tells me I'm in for a chocolaty treat of musical goodness. Mmmmm.
Anywho - so to attend this worthwhile event I had to purchase tickets from a website - and you may be familiar with the plight which is to follow. Off I logged onto www.ticketweb.co.uk to buy my 2 wonder passes, priced at 15 Great British Pounds each. These tickets would then have to be sent to me by post or maybe some other new fangled way of delivery, like carrier pigeon, so I anticipated royal mail or bird training costs would figure into the equation. However! Joy of joys, there were even more options at my disposal. Which to choose?
First up, I can print them off myself! Hurrah, thought I, this should save a few pennies, after all, I'm using
- my paper
- my printer
- my time
- ergo my money
to procure the tickets in material form. Either that, or I can pick them up from the box office after my long plane, train, camel, taxi, bus, and donkey trip to Greenwich on the night. This, again would (you'd expect) save a few pennies, because I'm
- picking them up myself
Unfortunately, I then noted a few numbers by the side of these options, accompanied by a pound sign. It seems that even though I'm using
- my paper
- my printer
- my time
- ergo my money
effectively, I am paying for them to send me an email, or for them to keep them safe until I get to the box office and collect. I chose email. A glance at my inbox tells me that most people, nay, everybody in the world - manages to do this for free without charging £1.75 for the pleasure. So I pay for the tickets, I pay for them to be "delivered" to my inbox so that I can enjoy printing them out, and then I check the total cost and LOW AND BEHOLD....
| Total Face Value: | 15.00 |  |
| Service Charge: | 1.88 | |
| Delivery Fees: | 1.75 |
SERVICE CHARGE? SERVICE CHARGE? But you haven't bloody done anything! That's like the time I went to Pizza Hut buffet and the waiter bought us the bill with 'service not included' and 'THANKYOU' scrawled across it ringed in red as if we owed him something for not bringing me my food and drinks! Are you kidding me?
What service have I actually received? As far as I can tell, I've done all the work here and paid £18.63...that's £3.63 more than the actual face value of the ticket.... to do everything myself.
Ticketmaster.co.uk is even bloody worse. £4.55 PER ticket service charge. So 2 tickets for the Prodigy next year
| Tickets (The Prodigy - Seated) | |
| FULL PRICE TICKET | £32.50 x 2 |
| Total Service Charge(s) | £4.55 x 2 |
| Standard Post (includes Order Processing Fee) | £2.75 |
| TOTAL CHARGES | £76.85 |
HA! Service charges! HA! Paying to print off my own tickets which are on a sheet of paper covered in adverts! BAH! £2.75 for an envelope with a bit of paper in it not even sent recorded delivery. GAH!
Bloody ridiculous.
Humph.
(Not that it's going to stop me going to any of the above events, but still. It's the principal of the thing)
15 comments:
Gah!!!
(I realise that was a completely pointless comment, but I love the sarcastic tone of this post so much I had to say something!)
The criminality of ticket providers is one of my major buttons to push. I think that “hate” is a powerful word that shouldn't be tossed around lightly, but I really hate those guys. Here in the U.S., we are charged a “convenience fee.” Filthy bastards!
I agree that Ticketmaster is a complete fu*king rip-off. I bought 2 tickets to watch Bon Iver in December for £18.50 each, total of £37, but ended up paying £47 because of stupid credit card charges and delivery cost. If I'd known about the additional costs I probably wouldn't have gone there to buy them!
I have had the same reaction to buying tickets, from theatre to train tickets. It's disgraceful. Ticketmaster are the worst for this though. Sadly it's hard to get around them most of the time.
I see a grassroots-internet-petiotiony-movement-fashion-style-thing in its infancy...
Try reserving your train tickets on-line for pick-up at a self-service collection machine and you'll soon find yourself paying extra on top too. It's all a big fat con and the only answer is murder.
And also, I should add that when I tried to buy an extra ticket for tonight and it wasn't going through online, I had to call them up - only to find out that they charge ANOTHER fee for doing it over the phone! It was 40p more than online or something. Again, not a huge amount - but Whhhhy?!
Have Mr Scruff make you a cup of tea
I'm sure that when I bought my Buena Vista Social Club tickets through TM I didn't pay any extra for the privilege of printing them.
Now you've got me worried that I did :(
Almost makes scalpers (you call them something else) look respectable. Almost.
It is the same with thetrainline.com - they charge you now to use a debit card, or to use a credit card, then they charge you to have the tickets posted, or to collect them yourself. they may as well just include it all into the ticket price rather than make everyone feel irritated when they book. hmph.
thetrainline.com didn't use to charge for pick-up, but they started doing it recently - much to my annoyance!
It's (kinda) like buying cheap plane tickets, only to discover that you have to pay for luggage on top! That pisses me off immensely.
They should just put it all into the ticket price rather than screwing you over afterwards... But I suppose once you've been hooked by the cheap price you want the tickets so they're sold.
Thing is, they rip us off because they can. I mean who's NOT going to go ahead and buy tickets allocated to them because of the extra charge? It is disgraceful but there's not a lot you can do about it.
I feel your pain. They did this to me with tickets for The Streets. Only they didn't even deliver them and I had to phone a premium rate number to ask them to "deliver" them.
Scumbags
CP x
Ticketmaster has a "convenience charge."
INCONVENIENCE CHARGE IS MORE LIKE IT!
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