The minefield of ticketing…..

Critics have it easy — typically, we simply ring up or e-mail a press agent and (most of) our needs are taken care of. They want us there (for the most part) and we (usually!) want to be there!. But I wonder just how much that equation works with theatres looking after the people who really matter: the ticket buying public.

I am provoked to ask this question by an experience this week of trying to buy tickets for the San Francisco run of Jersey Boys. I wanted to just be a punter: the show is a Broadway sell-out, and I’ve already had my press tickets when I saw it there, so rather than impose on the press agent again when I head out to the West Coast in a couple of weeks’ time, I thought I’d just try to buy a ticket.

It’s not as easy as it seems. The first challenge was trying to find the “official” website for the theatre. I knew it was playing somewhere in San Francisco; and the first place google took me to seemed promising: the site was called curran-theater.com, which seemed legit, since that is indeed the name of the theatre that it is playing at in the Bay Area. But no — when you read the (very) small print on the homepage, you discover that someone has cleverly bought up the name, and “We are in no way associated with or authorized by the Curran Theatre and neither that entity nor any of its affiliates have licensed or endorsed us to sell tickets, goods and or services in conjunction with their events.”

But here they are, selling tickets in conjunction with their events — at prices, for the performance I was interested in, from $150-$200. It was the price itself that made me smell a rat — not the disclaimer (which I’d missed), since that was higher even than the Broadway price.

Eventually, I found the official website for the theatre — http://www.shnsf.com/ — and was duly re-directed from it to purchase a ticket via Ticketmaster. No problems there, and at least they’re transparent about their pricing and service charges. But as I proceeded through the transaction, I felt like I was being ripped off all over again: the ticket may have cost $85, but by the time I was done, the cost was $101.15, with three separate service charges being applied: a ‘convenience charge’ of $9.75 (what a euphemism!); an ‘order processing fee’ of $3.90 (what was the convenience charge, then?); and best of all — a delivery charge of $2.50 — which since I had selected the “TicketFast Delivery” system, means I was PRINTING OUT THE TICKETS MYSELF! In other words, I was being charged $2.50 for the privilege of using my own printer cartridge. All they did to earn the $2.50, in addition to the convenience and processing fees, was to send me an e-mail linking me to the place I could do so from.

No wonder punters feel ripped off. I realise that ticketing costs have to paid for somehow, and using a 3rd party agency to run the ticketing externally means convenience for theatre and (potentially) the customer, but an online purchase saves the theatre and agency almost all the costs of managing the process, right down to the necessity to print the tickets.