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It is 20 years since the V&A was roundly mocked for marketing itself as “an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”. Now every front-rank cultural “destination” has an ace cafe attached - Tate Modern even employs a sommelier- and we can choose not only to dine out in their restaurants, but to buy reams of exhibition- or gig-related merchandise in their shops. Even if you avoid the total “brand experience”, however, you can’t help but notice that when going out to consume culture these days, it’s hard to avoid racking up heavy additional costs.
Just a quick bite in the venue’s cafe or bar before curtain-up, a skim of the programme and an interval drink will boost the cost of the evening by £20, at least. Some venues certainly do their best to empty your pockets. At Wembley Arena and the Shepherds Bush Empire, in London, it’s almost a case of “think of a number”, with a small bottle of water getting on for £2. The same is true of house champagne at both the Royal Opera House and the London Coliseum: £9.50 a glass. Talk about reinforcing perceptions of opera being elitist: their access policies clearly don’t stretch to the bar.
Programmes yo-yo in price depending on the artist or production (see below). Pop divas demand more than a tenner; West End shows hover at about £3.50; opera booklets, admittedly pretty detailed, split the difference. At least you can choose whether or not to buy them; at most pop festivals, if you want to know who’s on when, you essentially have no choice but to fork out for a running-order guide that can cost up to £10.
Yet, while we all seem to assume that the venues rip us off on food and drink, with a few exceptions this was not borne out in a survey comparing costs at 20 leading arts venues with typical pub prices. In canvassing the views of their audiences, it turns out that where consumers are really being squeezed is through the additional fees that box offices - and especially ticket agencies - are levying.
These insidious surcharges can add as much as 30% to the cost of a ticket. Although made aware of them by small print, consumers are confused by what they actually cover, and infuriated by their scale.
Typically, having decided to go to a show, you go online to book some tickets. Ploughing through all the boxes to fill in your details, you finally get to reserve the tickets and make it through to the payment page. Only at this point is the true price revealed, with the delivery charges being tacked on, together with a booking fee. And you have only moments to accept or decline before the system logs you out.
Guy Fairbank, from Chiswick, typified the resentment of many consumers when recalling the extra charges levied by Ticketmaster on Madonna’s Confessions tour appearance at Wembley Arena: “If the £160 price tag wasn’t bad enough, the additional £13 booking fee per ticket just rubbed it in. And there was £2.95 for postage. What do agents do to justify the supplement? It certainly wasn’t for the ticket artwork, which was insipid.”
Ticket agents have West End theatre-goers - and rock and pop fans, especially - over a barrel. Since venues began to out-source sales, an industry has consolidated around a few big players. Booking fees provide them with most of their revenue, but that is not always obvious to us consumers, hence our disgruntled response. Agents use various terms to describe their cut (such as service charges, processing or convenience fees), a situation the Labour MP Ben Chapman says can be “downright misleading”. Delivery or transaction chargesare always more than the cost of a stamp, too.
Historically, West End agents have justified their existence by offering a “personal service”; for example, help with finding a gangway seat (wow!) and with refunds and returns. When most tickets are sold online, however, this doesn’t wash, if it ever did.
Today, legitimate agents such as Ticketmaster, See Tickets and Gigantic bill us for the “convenience” of not having to queue in person to hand over cash at the box office (and it has to be cash, not a credit card, to ensure there are no charges added on). The relatively modest fees charged by those venues that do offer a direct option to book online (for example, £1 at English National Opera or £2 at the Wales Millennium Centre) or over the phone (£1.50 at ENO; £2 at WMC) suggest that we are regularly charged over the odds for the ticketing industry’s “safe and reliable” service.
With most ticket agents, the combined mark-up of 10% on that Madonna ticket is standard practice. If anything, it’s one of the better deals. Nick Blackburn, the managing director of See Tickets, says that, after Vat, his gross margin before costs is 12%, which he describes as “pretty reasonable in any business”. He adds that general admission tickets must be sent out special delivery because, if they go missing, they cannot be duplicated. He feels that, to combat touting, only firms “appointed by the organiser of the event” should be allowed to sell tickets.
This month, a survey in Which? magazine found some agents slap nearly a third of the face value onto theatre and concert tickets. For REM’s forthcoming gig at Twickenham, Stargreen demanded 21% more than the face value, See Tickets 19% and Ticketmaster 18%. The last-named says its average service charges are 9%-11% of face value. The worst offender was Theatre Tickets Direct, which marked up tickets for the musical Buddy by 30%. The company commented that many of its other tickets are sold at half price, and that its booking fees are not fixed.
It’s little wonder that four out of five Which? members believe booking fees are too high and do not reflect the value of the service, while 89% want to see all charges included in the first price advertised.
Moreover, a Ticketmaster customer told me that the site’s £25 ticket for a Somerset House gig incurs a service charge of £2.95 and a delivery charge of £2.50 (an additional 22%), even when the ticket is a PDF file you print out yourself – using your own ink, paper and electricity. This innovation, called TicketFast, also attracted the ire of Which?, although Ticketmaster says that the cost will “support newer delivery methods...where scanning hardware is required at participating venues”. In other words, this is a new piece of kit that will save us money, and you are funding its implementation costs. Surely, in the 21st century, paying such a premium to experience the miracle of telephony, let alone the internet, is excessive? Well, it seems, “Computer says no”.
In response to the Which? report, Ticketmaster says it “cooperated fully” and that its fees are displayed “very clearly... before the transaction takes place”. It added that independent research said 96% of customers had a “positive experience” using its service.
What most irks consumers I spoke to, however, is that the level of ticket surcharges usually isn’t revealed until the moment you are asked to commit to buying. Like some retail Robocop, Ticketmaster’s website, for example, gives you three minutes to comply before the tickets being held for you are released back onto the market. While legally above board, this hardly chimes with the spirit of the Office of Fair Trading’s view that “all charges linked to the purchase of tickets, including booking and delivery costs, should be transparent and conveyed priorto the consumer making a decision on whether to purchase, so that consumers can shop around effectively” (italics mine).
The OFT and Star (the Society of Ticket Agents & Retailers, a trade body including some, but by no means all, of the ticketing industry) have spent 3½ years working on a new code of principles. As of last week, Star says, it is nearly ready. Agents argue against a single advertised price for tickets, claiming it would obscure special offers and concessions, but not publishing surcharges up front is sneaky and underhand.
Will the OFT/Star principles on best practice address this? If they do, they will have found a way to finesse the slight contradiction between advertising-industry guidance and the law: the latter tells agents to “make clear in any price indication what the face value is”; the former, issued by the Committee of Advertising Practice, says: “If extra charges are mandatory or
common, advertisers should state the inclusive price that must be paid for a ticket.” The level of booking fees, however, is a commercial matter, and beyond Star’s remit.
The government’s focus is also elsewhere - on the risk of fraud in what has become a burgeoning secondary market for tickets online. According to a select-committee report, some see it as “a scourge, where parasitic profiteering threatens the very future of the industries on which it feeds”, while others see it as “a valuable service, a godsend to fans who are desperate to obtain tickets for oversubscribed events”. The secondary market isn’t just eBay, and it isn’t just genuine fans trying to offload their tickets when they can’t go and can’t get a refund. This is Web 2.0 touting, and that involves many otherwise solid citizens selling tickets for profit. Some sites, such as acetickets.co.uk (closed by the police this month), are rogue traders. Others, such as Seatwave, are tech start-ups that aim to be honest brokers in a resale market worth about £1 billion in the UK.
Common sense might tell you that a site looks dodgy, but how do you know the provenance of those tickets that Which? found being sold with a mark-up of anything between 59% and 144%? You don’t. Seatwave says that it weeds out phonies by preauthorising sellers’ credit cards and charging them if things go wrong. At present, up to 30% of transactions a month on its exchange are “speculative”, it says, but only 1% are made under false pretences.
A safe resale environment would benefit consumers, but legislation is a last resort for the government. Thus, a lot is riding on that OFT/Star code. Is it too much to expect it to help us make a properly informed choice between authorised sellers’ prices, as well as tackling the wild west of the tout market? Let’s hope not.
How they add up
DRINKS
Champagne is always an extravagance, which is perhaps the reason the opera houses (£9.50) can charge so much for a glass. Sadler’s Wells (£6.75) and the Wales Millennium Centre (£6.32 average across its three bars) are more in line with expectations; the Old Vic is steeper (£7.50).
Pop venues are, perhaps predictably, the most consistent offenders with regard to mineral water – £1.90 for a small bottle at Wembley Arena (£4 for a large) and £1.95 at the Shepherds Bush Empire. They are taxing our right to sweat! The same is true for beer – £3.60 for a horrid pint of lager at the Empire. In the West End, “theatre prices” mean £8 for two (small) glasses of wine. At Trafalgar Studios, it is £4.80 for a large (250ml) glass, which is not much more than a typical pub chain charges.
PROGRAMMES
One interviewee drew the line at £4 for a Speed-the-Plow programme at the Old Vic, commenting that it’s a lot to pay for local advertising. But there is more content in theatre programmes, generally, than in the glossy numbers produced for pop concerts. According to Manchester’s MEN Arena, some artists charge up to £15. You would have to want a souvenir badly to spend that: I did spend £12 once at a Tori Amos gig, but it was for research purposes.
The National Theatre’s free cast lists, those at the Royal Opera House and the Royal Court Theatre’s £3 “script programmes”, which include the text of new plays, get bouquets all round.
TICKETS
In-house box offices do have administrative costs, but how much is it reasonable to pass on? The Roundhouse and the Barbican both charge £2.50 for telephone bookings, which should be the limit, according to my polling. Online fees for in-house box offices are often £1 cheaper.
These pale into insignificance next to the mark-ups demanded by websites claiming to have tickets for sold-out events. There is no easy way of telling which of them are bogus. A Culture colleague did get his Cream reunion tickets (for £350 each) – but the website he used, Getmetickets.net, was later closed down. Ticketmaster has bought Get Me In, one of the legitimate online ticket exchanges, so the market is being “tidied up”. Some agents are claiming 25% commissions, however – which consumers might feel is tidy too.
One upside of industry recognition could be approved status for reputable operators, as proposed by the Resale Rights Society, a lobby group of music managers.
FOOD
The north-south divide: sarnies start at £3.75 at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, but £9.90 at the Royal Opera House. Maybe that’s just Covent Garden for you - English National Opera’s cheapest is £4.25.
The Old Vic’s £4.50 for a sandwich and chips sounds fine, until you find you can get a hot roast-beef one for £3.95 at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The Barbican’s hot food begins at £5.95, though an interviewee felt its Waterside Cafe wasn’t that “ace”.
It’s at the larger gig venues where fast food is priciest. Perhaps they feel folk who have worked up an appetite in the moshpit won’t notice, but still - for £8.50, Wembley Arena’s burger and chips had better be good.
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As the economic downturn deepens, belts are tightened several notches, and no one can afford to leave their front room, the tumbleweed will blow across the West End, thus the boot will most assuredly be on the other foot and the shyster venues and their ticket cronies will sing a different tune.
Tony, London,
Charging me the same £2.50 to use my own printer and electricity to print a ticket (for any town) as for printing and posting it is downright iniquitous. Worse still, the ticket is padded with adverts and and presented in colour, wasting ink and meaning I can't print 2 on 1 sheet - not very green!
Mary Branscombe, London ,
And after a few drinks don't forget the cost of that kebab on the way home, and the comfort fry up the next morning.
Paul, Reading,
I did take my own bottle of water with me when I went to see Dancing On Ice at the MEN, however was told by one of the stewards that I had to bin it before I was allowed to go in.
Katie, halifax,
My experience of going to concerts in London is bottles of waters are confiscated on the way in. Then you're charged £2.50 for exactly the same item at the bar. Why don't venues say they're just intent on ripping their captive audiences off? It's even worse at service stations. Totally unjustified.
Alex, Cardiff,
At last, fearless investigative journalism reveals that Londoners pay over the odds for everything from tepid bottled water to a goat's-cheese panini. How disappointing it must be for you that, in this age of the internet, you don't get to yell "stop the press!" when you finish typing these pieces.
David, Somerset,
No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures, said Samuel Johnson. So we may nod thoughtfully at the latest wishy-washy artistic ramblings, as if they did something for us, but we demand a proper drink, lunch or dinner afterwards.
Frank Upton, Solihull,
The Waterside Cafe at the Barbican is ludicrously overpriced - school dinner style hot food with pretensions. It's so bad/expensive that we bring a picnic, including wine, when we're going to a concert. There's plenty of seating and tables to eat your own food at - why pay more?
SarahN, London, UK
'Marketing' plays a part in hiking ticket prices - and restricting choice. Top-price ballet tickets now nudge £100 with little price variaton between a seat in the stalls and the Upper Circle. To secure the seats you want, you are frequently obliged to buy premium 'Champagne seats'.
Clive Burton, London ,
One simple law making it illegal for anyone to sell any ticket for any event at above face value with no additional charges for "service", postage etc.
Phil , Hertford,
In another shameless attempt to try and get some tourists to visit Coventry, please note that the www.godivafestival.co.uk is on this coming weekend, 4-6 July, and it is all FREE; so is visiting the Cathedrals, so is visiting St Mary's Guildhall, so is visiting the Transport Museum.
Paul, Coventry,
A few years back I bought tickets in person for cash at Wyndham's box office.
I was still charged a fee.
Allan, Skipton, UK
Another preposterously Londoncentric article. About forty references to London, one to Cardiff. Try living outside the capital. The supposedly "free" museums/galleries involve £50-60 for a train fare, tube fares (without the Oyster discount), plus your observations about food, programmes, etc.
Steve White, Nottingham,
A nation of shopkeepers or a nation of rip-off artists - that is the question. On the other hand, how often can a sane person stand to watch the same Shakespeare plays or bear to watch Madonna hopping? No one is forced to pay.
Heinz Geyer, London, UK
It's all quite simple. just take a bottle of water and a sandwich with you. Instead of buying a programme, just inform yourself about the cast on the website before you go and if you are going to the opera, take the CD-booklet with you.
David Maclachlan, Romanshorn, Switzerland