Biden Wants to End Outrageous ‘Service Fees’ for Concert and Game Tickets

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If he gets his way, the savings could be huge. 

Has this ever happened to you? You go online to buy concert tickets, thinking you’ll dip into your savings account to pay the $75 per ticket because the band is a favorite of yours. Only by the time you’re done paying for services fees, convenience fees, and other random charges, you’re looking at $110 per ticket instead.

Suddenly, you’re over budget, and you can’t afford to go to the show. Or, you decide to move forward with your purchase, charge it on your credit card, and pay it off when you can — only to rack up interest that costs you even more money along the way.

Excessive service fees for online ticket purchases have been a major sore spot for consumers for a long time. And unfortunately, they’re often unavoidable due to the fact that certain companies, like Ticketmaster, have a virtual monopoly on the ticket-selling industry.

The Biden administration, however, is trying to change that. And if it succeeds, the cost of attending a live event could become increasingly less financially burdensome.

Battling junk fees

The Biden administration is on a mission to reduce or eliminate junk fees — unexpected fees that catch consumers off guard and cost them money. And service fees for online ticket purchases easily fall into this category.

When you go online to buy tickets for an event, you won’t always see the total price you’ll be charged up front. Instead, you’ll see the ticket price, and only once you check out will you realize what your purchase will actually cost you.

In some cases, the fees attached to a ticket purchase might equal or exceed the cost of your ticket itself. And that’s something Biden and his administration want to put an end to. As such, Biden is urging lawmakers to crack down on excessive service fees for tickets.

Just how bad is this problem? A review of 31 different sporting events across five ticket-seller websites found that service fees averaged more than 20% of tickets’ face value. Worse yet, total fees, including processing, delivery, and facility fees, averaged more than 50% of tickets’ face value. Whittling down those fees could make concerts, sporting events, and other such forms of entertainment more affordable to the public.

Be careful when buying tickets online

The upside of using a service like Ticketmaster when buying tickets to an event is that you’re guaranteed entry — you don’t have to worry about ending up with a bogus ticket, which could be the case if you buy one directly through a private seller via a site like Craigslist. But in exchange for that peace of mind, you could wind up spending a boatload of money on fees that add to your costs in a very big way.

For now, those fees may be inevitable. But do yourself a favor and pay attention to the total price of a given event before completing your ticket purchase. You may find that the number you end up paying isn’t the number you expected to pay. And you don’t want to land in a situation where you’re stuck carrying a credit card balance forward because of that.

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