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Stuff
Paper tickets are now a rarity for most people, but often hefty service fees remain.
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The Cure (the band) might just be the cure (the solution) to those sneaky, pesky, outrageous, make-you-want-to-throw-a-tantrum “service fees” that get tacked on to just about any online purchase these days.
The Cure (the band) is currently touring the US, and the band made a deliberate decision to keep ticket prices as low as possible.
But you know what foiled their plan? The ticket service fees fans were facing from Ticketmaster – which costed more than the original ticket price.
“I’M AS SICKENED AS YOU ALL ARE” tweeted The Cure (the band) frontman Robert Smith (and yes, all caps).
“I HAVE BEEN ASKING HOW THEY ARE JUSTIFIED”, he shoutingly promised in the same tweet, and then eventually delivered.
Ticketing giant Ticketmaster agreed to refund roughly US$10 to the people who’d bought the cheapest $20 (NZ$32) tickets, and about $8 for all other tickets after many people were forced to pay additional fees that were worth more than the actual ticket.
Consumer NZ has been fighting the same good fight as The Cure (the band) for a while now.
In 2017, it began its campaign to end “Sneaky Fees”, calling for all-inclusive pricing rules – essentially saying if you’re going to whack on an additional $15 fee, just add it in to the original price instead of surprising people at the end.
“We did some surveying to ask people how annoyed they get with undisclosed fees being added on at the end of their distraction.. Pretty annoyed was the answer,” Consumer NZ chief executive Jon Duffy tells Newsable.
Newsable asked Duffy what the “service fee” even pays for.
“The CEO’s champagne fridge,” he laughs before asking the same question himself.
“The artist will be paying [the ticket company] a certain amount to run the ticketing for that event, and then really this just appears to be just creaming a little bit of extra off the top of the actual face value of the ticket.”
The Cure (the band) has been the cure (the solution) for their own service fee stoush, but we’ll have to wait and see if The Cure (the band) will be the cure (the solution) for the wider service fee stoush (and it’s not looking likely).
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