Ticket companies that charge booking and delivery fees of up to £16 a ticket have been reported to the Competition and Markets Authority after an investigation by the consumer group Which?.
The organisation gave online ticket companies a month to justify compulsory fees, such as the £2.50 some charge consumers for printing out their tickets at home. The deadline passed on Wednesday.
Ticketing giants Ticketmaster and See Tickets were among those that failed to respond to the deadline. Both impose a "delivery" fee of up to £3 on those picking up their tickets from a venue's box office – one of 36 different types of delivery charge Ticketmaster admitted it levies.
Compulsory fees add an average of 18% to the face value of tickets, said Which?, and eight in 10 people think this level of mark-up is a rip-off. Extra charges are typically added to the ticket price for booking and for delivery, though they appear under names such as "fulfilment fee", "transaction fee" and "service charge".
Which? found the highest individual fee as a proportion of the ticket price was through Stargreen, which charged 37% (£9.25) on top of the face value of £25 to see Shakespeare in Love at the Noel Coward Theatre in London this month. Stargreen has since added an option to collect tickets at the box office for free.
Ticket companies are meant to display all compulsory fees upfront under the Advertising Standards Authority's code of practice and earlier this year seven major ticket companies, including Ticketmaster, agreed to do this. However, Which? wants ticket companies and entertainment venues to go further and to give a clear explanation of what the fees are for and to set them at a fair level.
"While it's good that most companies are now being upfront about additional charges, major players in the ticketing industry appear still to be ignoring the anger of the thousands of consumers who joined our campaign against rip-off fees," said Which? executive director Richard Lloyd. "Our findings are now in the hands of the Competition and Markets Authority."
A spokeswoman for Ticketmaster said the company would not comment on the move but said that "the reality is that the fees paid cover the cost of providing a wide range of services to our clients, whom we sell tickets for."
The website said that it has advertised all booking fees upfront since 2009 and has listed all other charges upfront since January this year. The company admitted it imposes 36 different types of delivery charge, but that consumers are typically only given four of these per transaction to choose from.
"Tickets printed at home using our TicketFast option must be scanned and validated at the venues by our access control technology," said the spokeswoman. "Ticketmaster installs this technology at our own cost, as venues do not pay us to install the necessary equipment. The fees paid by the ticket buyer contribute to the cost of this service."
