Rep. Anthony Wiener after MLB for excessive ticket fees

[Gwreck]

Good for him.

http://weiner.house.gov/reports/baseballtickets.pdf

[Fman99]

Look out, the Wiener is after you next!

[Guest Edgy DC]

I'm not afraid of him. I've got a goat.

[metirish]

Weiner Proposal Major League Baseball teams are charging fans arbitrary and excessive fees when buying tickets online. Sometimes these fees can be greater than the ticket price. When fans buy tickets online, they don�t know what the final price of the ticket when they pick their seats. Online ticket vendors add extra fees at every step of the process. Virtually every time a fan clicks next, another fee is added. The first fees fans get hit with are convenience fees, which appear after they make their ticket selection. Then a printing fee gets added for fans that want to print their tickets at home. Then the final hit comes with the order processing fee just before the fan clicks to purchase the tickets. Solution To add greater transparency to baseball ticket fees, Rep. Weiner, who sits on the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection intends to propose legislation requiring all websites selling baseball tickets to display at the beginning of the ticket purchase the total amount of fees as a percent of the ticket price.

Oh , see I thought he would have an actual solution that stopped this type of ripoff , he just wants us to know before hand how much we will get done for.

[Gwreck]

I believe the idea is to shame them into charging more reasonable fees.

[Benjamin Grimm]

I agree that the fees appear arbitrary For example, why should I pay a fee to print tickets with my own ink and on my own paper when this method actually saves the team money, because they don't have to mail me anything. The answer, of course, is that this method actually is more convenient for me, and if I'm willing to pay $2.50 for that convenience, the teams are certainly willing to collect it. What the market will bear, and all that...

But you do get a chance to see the total cost before you actually commit to the purchase. If you select your seats, and find out that they'll cost $40 more than you wanted to spend, you can always bail. I can see that some fans may be irked by this process, but I doubt that many get fooled into spending more than they can afford, and those that do were simply not paying enough attention.

There are similar proposals for airline tickets, where it makes a bit more sense. You do see the taxes and airport fees and stuff before you purchase, but you can still be surprised later on by baggage fees when you arrive at the airport.

[A Boy Named Seo]

It's Ticketmaster Jr. over here. They can do shit like that because if you really want to see the Mets (or Justin Beiber or Madonna or who the hell ever), you pay the ridiculous fees or go exactly nowhere else to get your ticket. I bought 4 Band of Horses tickets for the Greek and got $44 bucks worth of "convenience" fees tacked on at the end, plus the order processing fee, plus the building facility fee. Sending them to my apt was free, but when I bought Eels tickets a couple weeks ago, they started charging $2 a ticket for that even.

Pearl Jam struck out swinging after a lengthy at bat trying to combat this shit in the day. I say go get 'em Wiener.

[Chad ochoseis]

It doesn't make much difference to me whether they jack up ticket prices directly or by sneaking in these extra fees. The net effect is the same.

It's their right, but given that the big bucks are made through concessions, product licensing, and TV revenues, the teams aren't helping themselves by increasing ticket prices. Take a little bit of loss on the tickets, make a lot of money elsewhere.

I'm happy with the Weiner plan (Fman, I'm putting it on a tee for you) of requiring teams to clarify the hidden costs.

Is there any way to avoid the fees? If I buy direct from the CitiField ticket counter and pay cash, do I pay face value?

[Benjamin Grimm]

I think in that case, they charge you an "inconvenience fee" of $5 to compensate them for the time you spent standing on their box office line.

[Ceetar]

Is there any way to avoid the fees? If I buy direct from the CitiField ticket counter and pay cash, do I pay face value?

yes. However, with the redsign of many stadiums, the cheap seats go first, so you can get to the booth day-of and only be offered $70 tickets. (I believe they may hold back some cheap seats for day of/gates open sales.)

[Frayed Knot]

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I think in that case, they charge you an "inconvenience fee" of $5 to compensate them for the time you spent standing on their box office line.

Jokes aside, there are cases where customers get charged for things like 'printing fees' even if they print their own, or 'handling fees' even if the tickets are picked up and never sent in the first place, etc.
IOW, these fees are frequently unavoidable by any means and are usually just a way of jacking up prices while advertising that the price of the ticket is only _____ . Obviously they have the right to charge whatever they think they can get away with but I have no problem with rules that make that process at least appear to be somewhat honest.

The real crime is when tickets on the "secondary market" are not secondary at all but rather an arm of the original seller making it look like they've got their hands on "hard to get" seats, seats which were actually just funneled to the re-seller branch of the business before ever actually being offered for sale in the first place. The Cubs did this a few years back and, when bad business practice suits were filed, beat the case in court in what seemed at the time to be Chicago politics at its best/worst.

[Valadius]

Our office is doing something similar with airline fees. And yes, the point is to shame them into dropping these fees altogether by forcing full disclosure up-front.

[ashie62]

Valadius wrote: Our office is doing something similar with airline fees. And yes, the point is to shame them into dropping these fees altogether by forcing full disclosure up-front.

I am sure that will work.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Go Weinerman, but fans could break the back of the agencies with about two weeks of organizing for collective action.

I mean, Yankee fans probalby wouldn't cooperate, but...

[Ceetar]

Visiting team gets a cut of the ticket sales. but I imagine they don't get a cut of the ticket fees.

[ashie62]

How about a Weiner Tax?

[Frayed Knot]

Ceetar wrote: Visiting team gets a cut of the ticket sales. but I imagine they don't get a cut of the ticket fees.

That's probably true in the same way that luxury boxes are considered "rent" rather than tickets sold and therefore aren't subject to being shared with the visiting club.