My Mate Is Trying To Book Tickets Online

Hang on, there's new female toilets in the west stand? I may break my West Stand virginity after all on Saturday.

 

Cambridge City Council are charging a £6 per ticket booking fee for the city's annual Folk Festival (not that I'm going).

This charge only applied for online and telephone bookings - not bookings at the box office.

People have complained and the matter is being investigated, as it could be against new Government regulations - which state that where organisations have a booking fee which varies depending on the payment method, it can only charge for the additional cost of processing the transfer.

However, to get round these, it is thought that the City council will charge £6 per ticket booking fee on box office transactions, too.

 

Built last year I think.
My female match day companion was quite excited by them.
Doors that lock an everythin...

 

Oh my...

 

It's a blatant way of just increasing income by extracting more money from customers. It's nothing to do with "administration fees" at all.

 

We don't do we? There have been loads of threads over the last few years about how these ticket companies fleece punters with their various charges.

I started one myself quite recently, but I'm certainly not the only one to do so.

http://bbs.barnsleyfc.org.uk/showthread.php?199720-What-s-a-facility-fee

 

Of course Barnsley should be different. Any company, large or small, should strive to be different. That's what marketing is all about. Simply doing what all your competitors do is crap marketing.

People talk about a "market driven" company, that's rubbish. A good company is "market driving", not "market driven".

 

It has, but as customers we don't like it, we feel we're being conned, whether the company selling those tickets is the O2 or Barnsley FC. We understand we will be charged, but booking fees per ticket not per transaction is unreasonable.

 

No it isn't. Ocado don't make a surcharge for each item in your shopping trolley. They make one charge for delivery, no matter how many items you buy.

And Waitrose delivery is free - ie they take the hit on that.

 

Businesses also get charged for paying cash or cheques into a bank account too.

 

When I phoned up recently about match tickets, the recorded message said there was a booking fee of £3.00 per ticket, which I thought was scandalous.

I think what all of us are saying is that this policy should be stopped - not just by BFC but by everyone who does it.

 

Yes, Ocado charge a service or delivery charge, but it isn't £1.50 per item you order, it's just a small delivery charge whether you order £50 or £500 of groceries.

It's the surcharge per ticket which Jay, myself and others think is wrong.

I buy most of my stuff from Waitrose and have done so for years, and delivery has been free for a few years now.

 

That's true. I paid £8,000 into my business account recently and was charged £60.00 !! So I never do it now.

I rent a card machine from Streamline so that my customers can pay by debit or credit card.

When customers pay by debit card, Streamline charge me up to 50p for that transaction. A credit card payment will cost me about 2.5% of the transaction (25p per every £10.00).

On top of that, I pay about £20.00 per month to rent the machine from Streamline.

 

That's a decent answer, but it still doesn't explain the justification for a "per ticket" charge rather than a "per transaction" charge. I know that's the Ticketmaster charge but it just seems so unfair and is putting people off buying tickets.

You go skiing, you use an electronic ski pass to get access. That type of system is what we should be using. Using a printed bit of paper for a ticket is archaic these days, but I do realise that the funds for such an investment are probably not available. However, we could probably have afforded it had we not had such a large squad of players this season, many of whom ended up playing for other clubs anyway. One day we will have to modernise, but at the moment we are falling further and further behind. More long term vision needed at the top, but I cant see it I'm afraid.