In my original post the business chose a higher priced supplier and made that clear by the difference between the dinner price and the ticket price. Some of us are aware of the alternative that is less out of our own pockets for the exact same service that is on behalf of the business owner.
FWIW the event capacity was 54 that would be 27 couples. Hardly what should be overwhelming booking for a restaurant.
Sales and marketing 101 used to teach that, and doing that would have been a better business look. If they did that I would not have been able to point to the apparent rip off amount.
I know there has been some discussion about undisclosed booking fees, particularly when booking flights & cinema tickets online. I was wondering if Choice have anything to say about the amount charged for booking fees?
I was looking at the Scienceworks website (Victoria). If I buy a $14 ticket online, I am charged a $4 booking fee (nearly 30% extra), irrespective of how I pay. This seems excessive to me. As mentioned by others, it would be in their interests to have more people buy tickets online rather than queuing up & requiring a staff member to assist with ticket purchase. Plus they’d have a better idea of how many people are going to visit each day & could plan accordingly.
Online ticketing as practised today is not an efficiency, not a service, and not a cost of doing business, it is a business profit centre. An increasing number of venues only sell tickets online with the “service|convenience|booking fees”. Some have a “will call” option so you can collect your tickets at the door, but you cannot buy them at the door. Some that still sell tickets at their “door” often add a service|convenience|booking fee for your privilege to buy them there, that is coincidentally the same as the online fees.
The percent “mark-up” in the total ticket price can be obscene as your example shows, but as a profit centre it is a fee for service, not a recovery fee.
Excessive credit card surcharges are banned as of September this year. The ban limits surcharges to the actual cost of processing the payment – about 1.3% of the total charge for credit cards, and 0.6% for debit cards.
I am the classic cynic, but the way our governments work (more so the coalition but also the ALP to a lesser degree) we may soon learn the credit card surcharge is capped at 1.3% but merchants can add a 1% network connection fee and a 1.5% terminal usage fee, to deliver 3.8%, and all is good because it is transparent. It is how the mindsets work in Canberra. Isn’t that one way they enabled the utilities to increase revenue?
The booking fees starting this topic seem to have become a thing. A major Melbourne hotel restaurant is hosting a dinner with a major vineyard’s wine and owner/maker. $129pp, very fair for what is on offer and the most common price for these dinners, but clicking on the sign up took me to ‘yet another service industry company’ who does bookings, with their own $8.10 (!!) booking fee added! Pretty steep for taking our money for what is at the end of the day a dinner booking.
Being a member of the vineyard’s wine club this time, I rang to express my dismay. They were not aware and they gave me a direct contact at the hotel to avoid the fee.
That route only had a 2% credit card fee documented although fee-free EFT was made an option.
In parallel my vineyard contact thanked me for raising the rip and expressed I was the first but not the only one who ‘provided feedback’. Within a day all of the add-on booking fees and surcharges disappeared - I signed up and am sure it is going to be a fine dinner with even finer wine.
Was there a credit card fee on top of the booking fee of (as I calc it) 6.28% ? I heard someone call this little scam out recently - booking fees combined with credit card fees … You’d certainly be ‘serviced’ at that rate! 2% for the CC is still ‘rich’.
Good to see the vineyard took the feedback seriously. I wonder if the people who’d already signed up got something back?
I don’t think so, but when I saw the $8.10 I stopped cold and proceeded no further.
Happily I seem to have been the leading edge ‘participant’ and ‘guest 0’ so to write.
I am prone to sign up for certain dinners within moments of the announcement. A few years ago I had an experience where after a week they announced a discounted early bird rate. After contacting them it became too hard to get a refund without one hit or another becoming unavoidable, but I negotiated a Very Nice bottle to take home post dinner, worth more than double the $ difference.
Looking at the local Caravan and camping expo for this weekend, and on their webpage they discuss ticket pricing…save $2 and buy online prior. Yet when you click through to purchase, there is a $2 booking fee added…no mention of that anywhere on the Expo page. I asked about buying at the gate and again, the $2 booking fee is added. When I rang to query and stated that I thought the true price should be shown, or at least mentioned somewhere on their website, she seemed to think I was the crazy one.
The true fees online are $18/$16 and at the gate $20/$18
