There’s a very good podcast about the economics of the ticket industry and Ticketmaster in particular here:
There’s also a transcript so you can read rather than listen.
A couple of eye-openers for me were that some of the TM fees actually go back to the venue and/or the artist. Why doesn’t the venue just charge a higher price and omit this complicated chicanery? Sometimes because the artists object to higher prices. One of the services TM offers the venues is basically being a scapegoat. People blame TM for the fees (as evidenced in this thread) and the venues and artists look like the good guys. The Head of Music at Ticketmaster said
Ticketmaster is scummy in many ways. I want to know how it is that they have hundreds of resale tickets available for hot shows before they even go on sale to the public.
I recently declined to buy tickets when the cost to get two nosebleed seats was $320 after including the $80 in fees. That is 33%!
I agree with the sentiment, but the resort fees are instructive. What if you outlaw them but the hotel charges for Wifi and newspapers and ice buckets in the room and clean sheets and toilet paper, etc. Oh you wanted beds in the room? Additional fee.
I think that there needs to be some sort of regulation that specifies what the “minimums” are that come with a hotel room or a ticket price. Until that is done, hotels and ticket places can simply redefine the minimums.
I mean, I can go to McDonalds and get free parking and free Wifi. Why is it acceptable to pay $300/night for a hotel room to have them tell you that parking and WiFi are additional charges?
Likewise, if you buy something on Ebay, many times shipping is extra, so why shouldn’t buying a ticket (when you want a paper ticket) be an upcharge? I think because that it is implicit in buying a ticket that you actually want it in your possession. An additional charge no matter what is fraud, I agree.
The problem with resort fees and many ticket fees is that 1) you can’t avoid them and 2) if it’s free, that just means everybody is paying for it. Free parking at a hotel means everybody is paying for it. Now,at a hotel in the suburbs or a rural area, parking may be cheap enough that it only adds a minimal amount to the cost of the room. That’s not necessarily true for a hotel in the city- in fact, hotels ( and venues and McDonalds) in the city may not have dedicated parking lots/garages at all. *
I don’t mind separate fees for services that I can refuse and therefore not pay for. I can’t avoid a resort fee- but I don’t need Wifi and wouldn’t pay an extra fee for it** , nor would I pay for a newspaper if there was a separate fee. Many people don’t need parking at a hotel and would save money if parking was not included. I don’t mind getting a discount if my sheets aren’t changed each day or if the room isn’t made up each day , which is no different than paying a fee for having the service daily.
I do think there should be some regulation that the advertised price must be a price that someone could actually pay - $100 for a ticket and $10 for shipping is fine with me if I could go to the venue or have the ticket emailed to me and avoid the fee. If I can’t avoid the parking fee even if I carpool, that should be baked into the price.
Nobody but hotel guests are parking in the lot of the suburban Holiday Inn - but a hotel in the city may not n own a parking lot and even if it does , chances are good it can charge non-guests for parking. In my experience, these places will charge guests about half the rate they charge non-guests.
** It’s not that I don’t want to be connected- it’s that I have a smartphone with unlimited data. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that hotels that used to charge $10-$15 dollars per day for internet access started rolling them into resort fees as smartphones/unlimited data became available.
*Snip. But my point is that something like this becomes the new way to sneak things in after you have forbidden ticketing fees and resort fees.
Instead of putting everything in a mandatory bundle, you just disentangle basic things and achieve the same deception. Some people may not watch television, use ice, ask for maid service, use the safe or the iron in the room. But I’ll bet you would be pretty upset to go to a hotel that advertised a base rate and then added surcharges for these things when you used them under the guise that charging you for these things is actually better because you can opt out.
Being the good capitalist that I am, I have no problem with this sort of thing so long as right by the quoted rate it says in the same font type “maid service not included” or “WiFi additional charge.”
I mean, I’m with you all 100%, but your proposal allows what Spirit Air does, though. I suppose that in some universe I might fly somewhere with no carry on or checked baggage, but it is not realistic to think that many people can do that. Does it only have to be theoretically possible or realistically possible?
I did actually mean to mention disclosure in there somewhere, so I’m with you on “maid service not included” being right next to the price in the same size font. But as far as "realistically possible ", I know multiple people who fly for week-long trips using only a carry-on, I know people who use only a checked bag and no carry-on and even more where a couple travels for a week with one checked bag and one-carry-on. I am absolutely certain there are some flights ( shuttles are one example) where a fair number of people have neither a checked bag nor a carry-on.
The thing is, right now there doesn’t seem to be any regulations at all , and in truth, I’m not sure how there *could be nation-wide regulation of all the industries it would apply to , even restricting it to cases where the customer can’t avoid the fee. Ticket sales , hotel resort fees ( even at hotels that are in no way a resort), mandatory gratuities at resorts/catering venues and so on
If you’re going to charge me $20 per person plus a 20% gratuity and tax , just charge me $24 plus tax ( which I don’t mind being broken out, because some potential customers aren’t required to pay it)
In many cases those are tickets that were owned by the venue or the performer. That allows them to make extra money, without “raising the prices,” even though that is the effect. In this case, a performer can charge $60 (a reasonable price in this example) for tickets, and so not upset the fans. The performer then releases a number of tickets onto the secondary market which sell at $250, which might be a more accurate reflection of the marketplace-determined value of the tickets, but is high enough it would alienate fans if that was the base price. That brings in much more money for the performer than if those seats sold at $60, but Stub Hub takes the blame for the high price.
Perhaps the FTC could have a rule that for any product or service, the advertised price must be no lower than what, say, half of actual customers actually pay. So say Spirit offers $50 flights with a $10 convenience fee if you don’t want to pay at their home office, and 90% of customers opt for the convenience fee. Then Spirit must advertise their flights as $60. (They can still offer $50 flights, but in ads they must describe that as an available discount off the normal price, along with conditions to get that discount.)
Basically, define a “normal price” based on what customers actually pay, and say they can’t advertise anything lower as the price, or show a lower base price for the item on their website or anywhere else.
That means all unavoidable fees would automatically become part of the main price. And some optional but very common fees would too. Companies could still have the exact same prices and options. This just keeps them from being dishonest or misleading when describing them. And that entirely removes their incentive to have unavoidable fees.
Hotels already are regulated for the essentials. There are standards of habitability, fire safety, cleanliness, etc. Check your local regs.
Actual ancillary things are reasonable to charge for or not. Like, it’s reasonable for some hoteliers to charge extra for access to the gym, or for wifi, or to watch movies on their in-house entertainment system, and for others to just roll all that stuff and breakfast too into one charge. The point is: it’s not hidden, and you can choose not to buy the extra stuff. A resort fee is fine if it’s actually a bundle of extra services that you can choose to buy or not buy.
I bet you can’t get free overnight parking at McDonalds, so it’s not really the same thing. I’ve only been charged for parking at hotels in pretty dense urban areas where land is expensive. And a decent amount of the time I stay at those sorts of places, I don’t have a car to park. At least partly because it’s more cost effective to take taxis than to rent a car when you have to pay absurd amounts to park everywhere. This is exactly the outcome we should want. People traveling to dense urban areas should have economic incentives to not add more vehicular traffic.
Shipping actually costs a different amount for many eBay packages depending on where the recipient is, so it makes sense to charge for it separately. That’s… not always the way that people use the shipping charge on eBay, but it’s a reasonable thing to break out separately.
Again, none of this is really analogous to Ticketmaster, which isn’t in the business of bundling or unbundling services. They’re just advertising one thing (a ticket to a show) and then when you try to buy it, they’re just adding on undisclosed bullshit. (uh, we need a, uhm, webserver exercise fee, and a headlight fluid change fee…)
The problem is that the resort fees are not optional, and are usually not clearly disclosed. Many hotel guests will find out when they checkout that there is an extra $15/night fee, whether they used any of the amenities or not. The fees are a way for hotels to game the system, so they can be sorted as a $145/night hotel on Google (or wherever), when really they’re $160 night. Usually someplace the hotel will disclose the fee, but it often takes a careful look at the fine print. At least that is my experience with them.
Yeah, I personally hate this about NYC. 250 per night plus ?? from summing up an entire page per night of assorted taxes and fees. No idea what is assorted politicos stiffing travellers (Javits center?) vs the hotel making out like bandits. Since my employer is paying I don’t really care but at least have the decency to tell me up front how much it’s going to cost in total so I can budget for it.
My point here was that the problem isn’t that some services aren’t included with the room price, but that it’s not transparent and not optional. There’s nothing wrong in theory with a hotel that says “hey, we have a pool and tennis courts and wifi and whatever, and if you want to use them, it’s $X a day, but if you just want to sleep in your room that’s the basic rate.” But no one does that.
I have lowered my expectations and only see bands in small venues now, cheaper and you get a much more intimate performance. So I mainly see lesser-known bands or bands past their prime.
We stayed at a place in Phoenix about 10 years back that had an on-site waterpark. This was handled by a 15/day resort fee that was non-optional. Yeah, it’s a way to lie about what your rates really are. And they wouldn’t even let us bring guests in for a gathering: it was a large-ish get-together, and the ones not staying there would have happily ponied up some reasonable fee to be allowed into the water area - but noooooo. Great Wolf Lodge similarly won’t let you bring a guest in, though at least their place has the decency to include it all in the room charge. I know they both want to be “exclusive” (and not too overcrowded) but it’d be a great marketing thing if they had a limited number of guest slots available each day. (Kudos to GWL, our last visit, though: there were a couple busloads of high school kids on their senior blowout trip to the beach about 30 miles away, and the weather was VILE, and GWL allowed them in for the day).
The place in Phoenix also charged something like 5-10 bucks a day for wi-fi access. That, at least, was optional. They were doubtless figuring that business travellers would need the wi-fi and therefore would have to pony up. Other hotels back then had similar policies - but the place I’m talking about was ridiculous: it was NOT the sort of place that attracted many business travellers. IIRC, one of our group paid the fee and we shared it. The tendency to charge more for piddly little things seems to be targeted at higher-end places; in other words, you’re really better off at a mid-range place for a number of reasons.
I booked a hotel room last fall through some shady site (pitted them, in fact) and was charged something like 30 bucks extra on a 60 dollar hotel room. For “resort fees and cleaning”. On a dingy one-star motel in my son’s college town. My bad for not glancing at the total before I clicked “purchase” - I was expecting 10 bucks for taxes etc and was shocked when I reviewed the total, too late.
Ticketmaster, now, is quite a nice little scamopoly. Last time I looked at buying Broadway tickets from them (for Wicked, about 6 years back, I think) the surcharges were something like 25 percent of the ticket price. I tried to verify that just now - and got a price for tickets but NO SEPARATE DISCLOSURE OF THE FEES. The price said 477.50 but the total was 998 dollars. Now, that’s 22 bucks apiece which is definitely lower than what I would have paid a few years back, but nowhere do they say what those fees are or why 477.50 (x 2, = 955) is now 998. At least that hotel had a line item on the bill for the resort fee.
Back when I wanted to see Wicked, I was so disgusted by the fees that I simply walked over to the theatre and bought them right there. THEY charged a fee too - about 2 bucks apiece. So yeah, you CANNOT get the offered item for the offered price.
I’ve done the same every time we’ve been there since then: if I wanted to see a bigger show (i.e. not available through TKTS), I’ve walked over to the theatre. This is, however, not an option if you really want to see a specific show and can’t be flexible. Then you’re stuck with the ripoff fees. Oh, and TM now allows resale of tickets - so all the Hamilton tix that got snatched up as soon as available are being resold. I thought there were laws against scalping for more than the original price???