Tickmaster’s CWS fees.

[Requiem For A Dawg]

I’m all about businesses making money, but it is downright criminal what Ticketmaster did.

For Game 1 tickets were at a premium. I fully expected and was happy to pay top dollar to watch my Dawgs. However, when my group decided to buy tickets for $230 a piece, we were shocked that Ticketmaster added on $75 in fees PER ticket. Tickets don’t normally even go for $75 in normal years. Rant over… but there has to be a better way of distributing tickets to fans without ripping them off.

 

[cowbell88]

Think I got hit with an $88 /ticket fees for the 3rd game. Venue, Convenience and E ticket fees.

Convenience and E ticket is what I have problems with. They were all electronic tickets!

 

[hatfieldms]

It should be illegal and I’m not really sure how it isn’t

 

[M R DAWGS]

Bought 3 tickets for the final game and each ticket had a $76 fee. That needs to be corrected, if not it’ll deter me from going back. This trip, it was worth every penny, but I’m not dealing with that again.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

Meh. The gif won’t upload.

I go to a lot of music shows and high ticket fees are not uncommon.

 

[Jeffreauxdawg]

Ticketmaster is a for profit business. And their job is to maximize profit for themselves and their event organizer/promoter/venue. They are good at their job.

Ticketmaster has expenses to cover just like any other business. Some of those fees are shared with the event organizer. Some of those fees cover the cost of ticket scanners (people and equipment.) Most of those fees are gross profit to pay for IT, marketing, and everything else... Including shareholder profits.

Fees are everywhere now. It's the way hotels, cable companies, events, banks, you name it... Fees are how they
"keep prices low". Have you been to Vegas lately? Check out resort fees before you book. A "$100" a night room might actually cost you $215 after resort fees, booking fees, taxes, etc...

It sucks. But it's the way everything is going. Increase fees so prices look low is the business model. If events brought all of the stuff TM does in house, it might actually cost more in some cases, it would just be included in the face value of the ticket.

 

[Russ Wheeler]

Ticketmaster is a for profit business. And their job is to maximize profit for themselves and their event organizer/promoter/venue. They are good at their job.

Ticketmaster has expenses to cover just like any other business. Some of those fees are shared with the event organizer. Some of those fees cover the cost of ticket scanners (people and equipment.) Most of those fees are gross profit to pay for IT, marketing, and everything else... Including shareholder profits.

Fees are everywhere now. It's the way hotels, cable companies, events, banks, you name it... Fees are how they
"keep prices low". Have you been to Vegas lately? Check out resort fees before you book. A "$100" a night room might actually cost you $215 after resort fees, booking fees, taxes, etc...

It sucks. But it's the way everything is going. Increase fees so prices look low is the business model. If events brought all of the stuff TM does in house, it might actually cost more in some cases, it would just be included in the face value of the ticket.

Another good example is VRBO. I recently booked a short trip on there, and obviously paid the fees. The owner was like, "Why didn't you just book directly through me? I could've saved you the fees!". I said, "I had no clue who you were before I booked it". That's the service VRBO brings to the table.

Ticketmaster knows people are using them for the ease of finding the tickets, and that's why they can charge what they do.

Didn't they used to have a really good ticket exchange at TDA? I guess Rona messed all that up.

 

[vhdawg]

Another good example is VRBO. I recently booked a short trip on there, and obviously paid the fees. The owner was like, "Why didn't you just book directly through me? I could've saved you the fees!". I said, "I had no clue who you were before I booked it". That's the service VRBO brings to the table.

Ticketmaster knows people are using them for the ease of finding the tickets, and that's why they can charge what they do.

Didn't they used to have a really good ticket exchange at TDA? I guess Rona messed all that up.

The difference is there's not an option to bypass Ticketmaster.

 

[8dog]

Yes. They used Prime Sports. I just cant imagine someone cant create a better option that costs less. Its software right?

 

[dog12]

I’m all about businesses making money, but it is downright criminal what Ticketmaster did.

For Game 1 tickets were at a premium. I fully expected and was happy to pay top dollar to watch my Dawgs. However, when my group decided to buy tickets for $230 a piece, we were shocked that Ticketmaster added on $75 in fees PER ticket. Tickets don’t normally even go for $75 in normal years. Rant over… but there has to be a better way of distributing tickets to fans without ripping them off.

Agree. These added fees are BS.

Why do these businesses add these fees? Why not just simply add these "fees" to the price of the ticket?

Whenever possible, I refuse to pay any sort of "convenience" fee or any other sort of fee. I'll write out a check and snail mail it to a physical address, if that's necessary to avoid fees.

The last "convenience" fee I paid was for 2 tickets to a high school girls lacrosse game. My daughter's team was playing another local high school, and those f*ckers were selling ONLY online tickets . . . due to the pandemic.

When I got ready to purchase the tickets, the 3rd party app added a $1 "convenience" fee to each ticket. Because it was our daughter's team, I paid the fee.

I suppose that these companies will continue to add these "fees" to tickets so long as enough people continue to buy the tickets.

 

[ll Martain ll]

Ticketmaster is a for profit business. And their job is to maximize profit for themselves and their event organizer/promoter/venue. They are good at their job.

Ticketmaster has expenses to cover just like any other business. Some of those fees are shared with the event organizer. Some of those fees cover the cost of ticket scanners (people and equipment.) Most of those fees are gross profit to pay for IT, marketing, and everything else... Including shareholder profits.

Fees are everywhere now. It's the way hotels, cable companies, events, banks, you name it... Fees are how they
"keep prices low". Have you been to Vegas lately? Check out resort fees before you book. A "$100" a night room might actually cost you $215 after resort fees, booking fees, taxes, etc...

It sucks. But it's the way everything is going. Increase fees so prices look low is the business model. If events brought all of the stuff TM does in house, it might actually cost more in some cases, it would just be included in the face value of the ticket.

My beef is if the actual out of pocket cost of the room all in price is $215, just advertise that that’s the cost. Don’t front and make it seem like you’re getting a good price of $100 when it’s not true.

Stubhub added a filter to show ticket cost with fees all included, and I appreciate that. Others could easily do the same, or just turn it on by default.

 

[aspendawg]

Margin Stacking

You’ve got some many parties involved all layering their margins on top of the cost of the ticket.

Merchant Service Fees from credit card company
Potential Fees From the processor or payment gateway (FirstData, ChasePay etc) then you’re eating the cost of whatever platform and/or SaaS is used to manage billing (i.e. Fusebill) and then the customer facing brand stacks on top of that (Ticketmaster)

The market has decided that this is the way. Blockchain could cut all these middle men out and I would highly doubt there’s not some sort of project in the works to disrupt all this BS

 

[Russ Wheeler]

Yes. They used Prime Sports. I just cant imagine someone cant create a better option that costs less. Its software right?

I'm sure they could. But the issue is just like with VRBO, people know who Ticketmaster is. I'm sure other ticket exchanges have sites or whatever, but you have to market them. BUT.....when so many people get screwed by Ticketmaster, that's when people go hunting for the other sites, and ultimately find them (if in fact they offer the same reasonable service or better).

Did Ticketmaster have exclusive rights or something?

 

[anon1787432961]

If someone wants to sue them for deceptive trade practices, that "12:10PM" thing was intentional and influenced by others that scalp the tickets online.

 

[eckie1]

To make matters worse....

I’m all about businesses making money, but it is downright criminal what Ticketmaster did.

For Game 1 tickets were at a premium. I fully expected and was happy to pay top dollar to watch my Dawgs. However, when my group decided to buy tickets for $230 a piece, we were shocked that Ticketmaster added on $75 in fees PER ticket. Tickets don’t normally even go for $75 in normal years. Rant over… but there has to be a better way of distributing tickets to fans without ripping them off.

.....their fees are based on the day and who’s playing. We went to the Vandy game where Stanford imploded. They were the cheapest tickets all week and the fees per ticket were less than $6.

Our FIRST game of the CWS was $33 per ticket (Sunday). 2nd game was $17-ish a ticket (Tuesday). 3rd game against Texas was $30-ish.

They get you big time on the weekend. But, they absolutely charge way more when the demand is there for teams like us. I agree that they need to make their profit, but they shouldn’t be able to just charge whatever they feel like.

I’d be interested to know what the fees would have been in the finals if it had been Stanford vs. Virginia.

 

[Nunya.sixpack]

Another good example is VRBO. I recently booked a short trip on there, and obviously paid the fees. The owner was like, "Why didn't you just book directly through me? I could've saved you the fees!". I said, "I had no clue who you were before I booked it". That's the service VRBO brings to the table.

Ticketmaster knows people are using them for the ease of finding the tickets, and that's why they can charge what they do.

Didn't they used to have a really good ticket exchange at TDA? I guess Rona messed all that up.

in the events i attended with a hot ticket, i have noticed the tickets are gone from the venue site within minutes and posted on ticketmaster at original+fee+fee+convenience+bonus+fee. it's not really any sort of service when they are putting tickets up 5 minutes after ticket sales open for an event.

last minute purchase, sure. great. you're at their mercy.

 

[kired]

Here's where they really make money. All those tickets were sold originally, somewhere around $35 - $75 each depending on location, with probably a 15% - 20% fee. Then they were resold to us - hitting us with a 20% fee and the seller with a 15% fee. Some were possibly sold again, particularly the finals tickets, with another 20% charge to buyer and 15% charge to seller.

When you buy those verified resale tickets listed at $100, you end up paying $120 and the seller gets $85. TM is pocketing $35 on that ticket that they likely already sold once and made at least $15 worth of fees.

And of course those $300 tickets, you pay $360, seller gets $255 and TM pockets $105. On a ticket that's likely been sold twice already.

 

[UpTheMiddlex3Punt]

The thing I hate must about Ticketmaster isn't the fees. It's the ****** seating options they provide most of the time. I'll go to buy tickets as soon as they start selling tickets and can only find nosebleed or awkward angle seats. I'll run into a friend and he'll have prime seats that he bought from Ticketmaster two days before the event.

 

[greenbean.sixpack]

If someone wants to sue them for deceptive trade practices, that "12:10PM" thing was intentional and influenced by others that scalp the tickets online.

The wife and i were logged on Ticketmaster (two seperate accounts) at 12:10 AM and had no problems getting $38 tickets ($50ish total) for game 3. We figured some millennial didn't the difference between AM/PM and from everything we read and heard, the tickets were going on sale 30 minutes after game 2.

 

[patdog]

It is the way everything is going. But it’s misleading, deceptive advertising & terrible for the consumer. There should be a consumer protection law that the advertised price is the price. Period.

 

[turkish]

Judging from the number of empty seats and game three, they found the limit folks were willing to pay and went a touch beyond it.

 

[cowbell88]

Judging from the number of empty seats and game three, they found the limit folks were willing to pay and went a touch beyond it.

But they announced a sell out and a record crowd on game 3. It was many empty seats. Saw very few on Monday.

Really made me wonder if Vandy bought a bunch of tickets (just to keep some of our fans out)

 

[TankOwens]

Same here. Game 3 ticket price was painful.

 

[Go Budaw]

I'm sure they could. But the issue is just like with VRBO, people know who Ticketmaster is. I'm sure other ticket exchanges have sites or whatever, but you have to market them. BUT.....when so many people get screwed by Ticketmaster, that's when people go hunting for the other sites, and ultimately find them (if in fact they offer the same reasonable service or better).

Did Ticketmaster have exclusive rights or something?

Ticketmaster did not have exclusive rights. Tickets could be found on StubHub, VividSeats, SeatGeek, etc. as well. No clue what their fees were though.

 

[RocketDawg]

The difference is there's not an option to bypass Ticketmaster.

Maybe not for the CWS tickets, but instead of buying tickets to a concert or other event at Kroger or online, I just make the relatively easy 12 mile drive to the ticket office and save $100 or so.

 

[ZombieKissinger]

Agree. I also think it's an interesting way to help them determine consumer surplus if they use it as a mechanism to price discriminate. Like if a bunch of state fans were buying $300 tickets, there are many of them that would've paid more (some $400, some $600, some $1000), and Ticketmaster is losing on that value. They could make it up by adjusting "fees" to better realize the true value of the ticket to the fan. They could compare the amount of "click but did not buy after seeing fees" to their normal "click but did not buy" rates for low fee events. Obviously other metrics at play too, but that'd be one way to adjust prices quickly to better capture that consumer surplus. There's also the "I've gotten this far so I might as well buy" factor that probably bumps up what people are willing to pay by a little bit.

 

[greenbean.sixpack]

But they announced a sell out and a record crowd on game 3. It was many empty seats. Saw very few on Monday.

Really made me wonder if Vandy bought a bunch of tickets (just to keep some of our fans out)

Can confirm many empty seats on Wednesday, but very few on Tuesday. Ticket prices shot up on Wednesday morning, but starting dropping steeply a few hours prior to game time. I think people just sucked it up and paid outrageous prices for games 1 and 2, but said 17 it for game 3.

 

[dickiedawg]

Their fees from what I saw were roughly 19 percent across the board. Obviously that results in higher fees for higher priced tickets- but that’s nothing nefarious.

Also, they didn’t have “exclusive” rights to resale tickets, but it was the default and much easier than reselling on Stubhub or whatever.

 

[kired]

I bought 4 sets of tickets thru TM. Two were original sales / new tickets - both had about 15% fee. Two were resales - both about 20% fee. (I may be getting those swapped, but they did charge different fees for whatever reason).

May also have something to do with where seats were located. The ones I bought new were club level and the resales were lower level.

 

[M R DAWGS]

The wife and i were logged on Ticketmaster (two seperate accounts) at 12:10 AM and had no problems getting $38 tickets ($50ish total) for game 3. We figured some millennial didn't the difference between AM/PM and from everything we read and heard, the tickets were going on sale 30 minutes after game 2.

you were lucky, I clicked on those things hundreds of times and there was always an error.

I was on there at 12:10 as well.

 

[paindonthurt_]

I certainly don’t like the fees but how can you say it should be illegal?

To me it seems like there is a huge opportunity for someone to create a similar site that is:

1. Easy to use
2. Easy to transfer
3. Way cheaper but still a great business model

 

[8dog]

Not exclusive but it was the official ticket vendor for the NCAA. None of it made sense. How was the get in price for games 1 and 2 around $200 at game time and about $15 for Game 3.

 

[MSUDC11]

Can confirm many empty seats on Wednesday, but very few on Tuesday. Ticket prices shot up on Wednesday morning, but starting dropping steeply a few hours prior to game time. I think people just sucked it up and paid outrageous prices for games 1 and 2, but said 17 it for game 3.

I think you had largely the same contingent of State and Vandy fans for all three games, but the locals didn’t show up for Game 3 like they did the first two games.

 

[paindonthurt_]

This is the part I don’t get.
Clearly the cws sold a lot of tickets to ticket master or just sold them that way.
I never saw a “face value” on the tickets I used. Maybe I missed it.

 

[paindonthurt_]

You clearly knew you were paying the fees before you made the purchase. If tou didn’t see the fees, you weren’t paying attention.

 

[greenbean.sixpack]

you were lucky, I clicked on those things hundreds of times and there was always an error.

I was on there at 12:10 as well.

We hot footed it back to the hotel so we would be on strong wifi and laptops. We didn't want to compete with everyone around the stadium for bandwidth (especially with Cspire service) .

 

[mount lefroy]

Ticketmaster is a for profit business. And their job is to maximize profit for themselves and their event organizer/promoter/venue. They are good at their job.

Ticketmaster has expenses to cover just like any other business. Some of those fees are shared with the event organizer. Some of those fees cover the cost of ticket scanners (people and equipment.) Most of those fees are gross profit to pay for IT, marketing, and everything else... Including shareholder profits.

Fees are everywhere now. It's the way hotels, cable companies, events, banks, you name it... Fees are how they
"keep prices low". Have you been to Vegas lately? Check out resort fees before you book. A "$100" a night room might actually cost you $215 after resort fees, booking fees, taxes, etc...

It sucks. But it's the way everything is going. Increase fees so prices look low is the business model. If events brought all of the stuff TM does in house, it might actually cost more in some cases, it would just be included in the face value of the ticket.

So are gas stations in a national disasters. But they cannot price gouge. These prices should be set early and not change.

 

[patdog]

If you advertise a product at one price and then charge another at checkout, it's still illegal whether the buyer notices it or not. Mandatory fees tacked on at the end of the buying process are really no different.

 

[Jeffreauxdawg]

It's not price gouging.

Some of the fees are fixed and those do stay the same (If the fixed fees are changing, that would be ********), but most of the fees are higher because the ticket prices are higher. It's a fixed percentage. So when you buy direct from the CWS let's say it's a 15% convenience fee and on a $30 ticket, it is only $4.50 fee. When you buy a $300 ticket from a reseller, that same fee is now $45. A chunk of that percentage is taxes. Assuming the 7% sales tax in Omaha, $21.00 of the fees don't go to TM at all. So the real nut buster is not the extra $24.00 TM is making, it's the $270 of markup from the reseller.

https://revenue.nebraska.gov/busine...e-remote-sellers-and-marketplace-facilitators