Booking fee rant...

It's a pain in the proverbial, isn't it? Some booking agents are worse than others (Ticketmaster and Seetickets spring to mind). If you can book direct from the Box Office of the venue, it's usually cheaper.

My QPR season ticket this season went up by £150. Then there was a £3.50 booking fee and then they charged £4.50 to post it to me. I got two tickets going to the same address and the £3.50 and £4.50 was for each of them. Makes me mad!

We had EXACTLY the same rant in our house last week when I booked our Ross Noble tickets. £19.50 plus booking fee plus postage fee so all in all £25. Gah.

This is direct to the venue. It's making me more annoyed because it's a production for children so i'm paying over £20 for a 2 year old, usually they're cheaper. These companies certainly know how to make money.

I asked at the local theatre about this, in their case at least it's because gov't funding has been cut, and the booking fee is the only bit of money that comes direct to the theatre to cover their costs - everything else has to be shared with the performers/promoters, so they'd have to put the cost up by loads to get the same income otherwise.

Not that I'm trying to justify quite how much they charge, mind you, just offering their explanation! £3.25 is pretty ridiculous on a ticket that's under £20 in the first place.

Can I join on the bandwagon and offer up Debit card charges?

Yet another way for airlines to falsely advertise cheap flights It used to be that they charged for using credit cards but now its all cards. Its not as if you can pay any other way.

The worst one I've had was for tickets to see Stevie Wonder from Seatwave. It was sold out so we paid £110 for tickets with a face value of £65. The final bill for 2 tickets was about £270 ?

I guess in that situation it really is a case of how much you're willing to pay if it's a sell out. I'm guilty of selling tickets at about three times their face value but if people are willing to pay it..... I didn't buy them intending to sell them at a profit but it was for Lee Evans and he added a new date closer to home so we bought tickets for that instead.

On second glance, the venue isn't selling the tickets, it's ents.web for ticketmaster. Chooks, those ticket prices are horrendous. We love to go and watch Liverpool but we're in the south and by the time we've bought tickets and added on the petrol it's really expensive.