I ordered baseball tickets online yesterday (bleacher seats at Wrigley). After paying for the tickets and a convenience fee (???) and a transaction fee(!!!) I was given the option of being able to print out the ticket on my computer for an additional $3.50 or having them mailed to me at no additional cost. This seems backwards to me, as it would be less effort for the Cubs to let me print out my own ticket than to have some minimum wage schmo stuff the ticket in an envelope and then pay postage. This seems to be MLB policy, by the way, as I had the same thing happen last year before my trip to Philly.
Does anyone know why this is the way it is? And if not, do you have any WAGs. Those are usually better than the truth anyway.
Traditionally they have mailed tickets to people at no additional cost. They might like to change that but people will throw fits if they try, so no change will be forthcoming.
E-mailing tickets, on the other hand, is a new phenomenon.
E-mailing tickets provides you with instant gratification. You are paying a price for your convenience.
E-mailing tickets requires more computers, more servers, more stuff behind scenes which can go wrong. All of this costs money, and the $3.50 charge is an attempt to obtain that money from the people who most benefit from it.
Persons who want tickets e-mailed cause more hassles later on that people who want them snail mailed. Charge them an additional fee, and they are more likely to choose to be patient snail mail customers.
MLB policy says one can’t charge extra for snail- mailing them, but you can for e-mailing the tickets. Reasons may be listed above, but may not.
Email tickets prompted the purchase of a great number of new barcode scanners for use at the park to validate that the tickets you’ve brought with you are genuine (as opposed to just looking at the properly printed tickets you would have got in the mail). The money to pay for that equipment has to come from somewhere.
As compared with a printing cost, paper cost, envelopes, stamps, physical handling? For something that is in a ticket system’s database already? Doesn’t compute. My computer doesn’t cost me as much as a stamp a day to run.
I wouldn’t know–can’t remember the last time I went to see a non-minor league Baselball game–probably since before one could easily acquire tickets online.
Nearly every professional sports venue and most big time college programs as well, use electronic scanners for tickets. There are still some tickets that have the stubs torn off, but not many. Even some movie theaters have scanners.
This reminds me of the early days of ATMs, when some banks charged their own customers for ATM transactions but not for old-style transactions with human tellers. ATMs save banks tons of money, but some banks charged for their use at first. They got away with it because the machines were new and customers didn’t have any expectation of free ATM service from their own banks. The extra fees weren’t to pay for the new hardware and R&D costs - the savings from not having to pay human tellers covered that.
Bar-coded tickets (both e-mailed and conventional) help prevent counterfeiting, which protects the revenues of the ballclub. Scanning of tickets is quicker than the old-fashioned method of tearing off ticket stubs, which means the ballclubs don’t need as many ticket-takers at the gates. At some ballparks (like the San Francisco Giants’ AT&T Park) the turnstiles have customer-operated scanners built into them, which means they don’t need a human ticket-taker at all in most cases.
For the above reasons, I believe sports franchises switched to bar-coded tickets to save money. The lower cost of operating bar-coded tickets probably pays for the hardware and software cost pretty quickly. Once a sports franchise decides to do this, the decision to make e-mailed tickets available is a no-brainer, since the ballclub saves the cost of postage and handling.
I expect that e-mailed tickets will be free within a few years. Once the novelty wears off people will realize that the extra fee for e-mail is a bad deal. Market forces should correct the problem.
The extra fee for e-mail is unavoidable if you are ordering tickets for a game the same day, or within the very near future. Not sure what percentage of tickets are bought within a few days of the event, but for some sports like baseball I’d wager it’s pretty high.
Yeah, i’m kind of baffled by this too. I think it’s because the technology to do the e-mailing is licensed by a third party so the ticket seller (Ticketmaster, et al) have to pay them royalties. Rather than take that out of their cut, they just charge the customer more.
Why customers actually pay for it though is beyond my comprehension. It costs money. You don’t have the hard ticket to keep for nostalgia view. And it’s harder to sell it in a pinch. Even if it’s just a couple of days before the event, you could just use will call which is also free.
One can always buy tickets at the ballpark without paying any fee at all. This is very common - for example, the Oakland A’s have historically sold most of their tickets on the day of the game through walk-up sales. There’s also will call.
Note that these options cost the ballclub more than the e-mail option.
This practice also has the side-effect of discouragi purchases from scalpers, since it’s impossible to tell if the pristine ticket you’re buying on the street hasn’t already been scanned for entry. Last year we had to unexpectedly leave a Cubs game in the third inning, and I was approached by more than one scalper who wanted my ticket stub.
Kinda like how people realized it was silly to pay $2 for a ringtone when they could buy the whole song for $1 and just put it on their phones over USB or Bluetooth?
I see these kinds of fees all over the place, and I don’t think they’re likely to go away any time soon. The real question is whether it’s worth the convenience to the customer. Even if it’s cheaper for the business to use electronic means, if it is also more convenient for the customer, they’ll likely charge for it.
I’m still doing my taxes on paper because it costs $15 to eFile. I still file change of address forms in paper, because it costs $3 to do it online. I pay my credit card online because it’s free, but if I wanted to pay it on the phone it would some crazy amount like $15, just to talk to a computer and input numbers (this one baffled me for a while, until I realized that the CC companies are exploiting people who can’t wait for the mail because they need to pay quickly, and don’t have internet access). It’s frustrating that so many businesses are making things so much less efficient for both parties because they can eke out a little more from some people, but I guess that’s the way it goes.
Can you elaborate on this? I don’t understand how it stops scalping. Even if the ticket has already been scanned, the bearer would still be admitted, right? Or do you not have reentry privileges at a sporting event?
I always have 'em mailed, makes for a better keepsake. I have a shoebox full of event tickets spanning the better part of my life. I’m not about to start filling it with 8 1/2 X 11 print outs, and I’m certainly not going to pay extra for it!
I don’t know about at the stadium scapling, but online scalping (eBay) is much more kosher (if that’s possible) with a hard ticket. A potential scam is to have ticketmaster email you the ticket, run off 20 copies, and sell them to 19 suckers. The stadium only lets in one person with that ticket number.