Joe Berchtold of Live Nation Entertainment and Jack Groetzinger of SeatGeek testify during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
Live events and ticketing companies are taking steps to no longer surprise customers with fees at checkout and instead include those fees upfront in the total price.
The White House, Live Nation, and SeatGeek announced the voluntary moves Thursday morning. President Biden met later in the afternoon with officials from those companies, as well as representatives from ticketing companies that had been using transparent, or “all-in,” pricing for years.
Adding fees toward the end of a purchase can be deceptive and harmful to consumers, experts say. In his State of the Union address in February, Biden called them out as “junk fees.”
Sitting with officials from SeatGeek, Live Nation, and other companies Thursday, Biden again aimed at the practice, describing the fees as “hidden charges that companies sneak into your bill to make you pay more without you knowing it initially.”
“Junk fees are not a matter for the wealthy very much, but they’re a matter for working folks like the homes I grew up in,” he added. “And they can add hundreds of dollars a month and make it harder for families to pay their bills. I think it’s just wrong.”
The changes announced Thursday do not mean that companies will eliminate the surcharges, but simply that the fees will be made clear to the consumer. It would apply only to tickets sold at the 200-plus venues owned by Live Nation – which is owned by the same company that controls Ticketmaster – but not necessarily to every ticket offered by Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster has said in the past that it controls only some of the fees it charges consumers, such as labor and technology costs, while other fees go toward venues and their expenses. When asked by The Washington Post for clarification on Thursday, Ticketmaster implied in a statement that it could only implement all-in pricing for all of its tickets if it has the cooperation of every venue it works with.
“Ticketmaster will make this tool available to all its venue clients across the United States if they want to adopt the all-in experience,” it said.
Ticketmaster’s meltdown in November, when its site broke down amid a rush for Taylor Swift tickets, sparked a wave of state and federal legislation that would require Ticketmaster and other companies to implement all-in pricing. Those fees can total an estimated 27 percent of the ticket price, according to a 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office.
“Live Nation is proud to provide fans with a better ticket-buying experience,” Tom See, president of Venue Nation, Live Nation’s venue division, said in a statement.
For its part, SeatGeek, a rival ticketing company, will roll out “product features” that will make ticket prices more transparent, according to the White House. The company already featured the option to include fees upfront, but at the White House’s request, the company agreed to make the feature more prominent throughout the purchasing process, a SeatGeek spokesman said.
“For far too long, fans have lacked important consumer protections that other industries take for granted,” SeatGeek chief executive Jack Groetzinger said in a statement. “Fans want to understand the full cost of their purchase, with no deception or surprises along the way.”
Surcharges do not just apply in the live events industry. They appear when consumers purchase airline tickets and hotel rooms, for example, and can be charged by banks and cellphone providers. To that end, the Biden administration is calling for more transparent pricing from airlines, banks, and cable and internet providers.
Another effort that Biden is backing is a bill in Congress termed the “Junk Fee Prevention Act” that would require companies to display fees upfront and reduce excessive fees.
MIXED RESULTS
While companies and lawmakers alike praise all-in pricing as transparent, it has been difficult for companies to implement by themselves.
For example, some earlier efforts were “not always embraced at the same time, in the same way,” said John Healy, managing director, and equity research analyst at Northcoast Research. A company offering all-in pricing by itself might be “penalized because consumers were thinking that their ticket is going to be much more expensive on that format,” he added.
In other words, no ticketing company wanted it to appear that their prices were higher than their competitors.
In 2014, StubHub learned the hard way when it experimented with all-in pricing, the Wall Street Journal reported. A few months into the shift saw customers moved to other ticketing sites because StubHub’s tickets appeared more expensive.
Less than two years later, the company reversed course, hiding its fees until later in the purchasing process while giving customers an option to see the full price upfront via a tool on its site, the Journal reported.
Ticketmaster hinted at this concern when asked recently by The Post why it hadn’t implemented all-in pricing sooner.
“It’s hard to be the only company that adopts fan-friendly policies like all-in pricing,” the company told The Post this week. “Your pricing looks higher than your competitors, even when it is the same or lower. The good guy gets punished in the marketplace.”
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