Pay for the pleasure of buying
MY partner has just spent £80.25 on the internet getting tickets for one pensioner and two of us to go and see Chicago at the Opera House in Manchester in October.
But £10.75 of that is booking charges. It costs £2.75 per full-paying adult and £2.50 for each pensioner.
In fact, they call it a “convenience charge”. But for whose convenience?
Surely it’s cheaper for the Opera House if its customers use an automated ticket-buying service on the net than for them to turn up in person and talk to a “time is money” member of staff?
Unless its software is incredibly poor – or was sourced by the people who source the government’s computery stuff – there’s no way the Opera House has incurred such big costs for a computerised booking service.
I’ve never understood booking fees anyway. The people who run these rackets seem to be saying: “We’ll sell you this. But you’ve got to pay extra for the pleasure of actually buying it.”