THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Not to mention the fact that nearly every airline has different policies on things such as bag fees, making straight-up comparison shopping basically impossible.

Yes, the bagging fee has slowed down the purchase cycle.  I used to be able to go to Continental.com and AirCanada.ca and Travelocity and make a straight comparison.  Now, I have to also go figure out what their baggage fee policies are.

How hard could it be for Travelocity to include an extra question: “How many bags?”

Unless it’s changed significantly in the last few years, Ticketmaster is the last company that should be giving advice about customer satisfaction.  Ticketmaster is the king of additional fees, or at least used to be.  I have an admittedly irrational hatred of buying tickets from them.  I especially can’t stand the added “convenience” fee for printing out the tickets myself--even though it saves Ticketmaster labor and postage.

Right, that’s why I was shocked to see its CEO say it.  It seems like he agrees with the consumers, but he seems to be not allowed to roll the fees into one, for some reason.  Like he needs permissions from the events to do that.

The events for example already roll the fees in (if you look at your ticket, you will see various fees broken out, but you always pay whatever the list price is).

I just bought concert tickets for “$29.50” on Ticket Master. Here’s the breakdown at the end:
Tickets: 29.50
Facility Charge: 2.75
Convenience Charge: 8.90
Order Processing Fee: 5.65
TOTAL: 46.55
Of course, none of those fees came were shown until when they wanted me to enter my CC info.

In my opinion it’s not very convenient to pay $8.90 for convenience.

Last year the Orioles ran a $1 ticket promotion.  They cost almost $7 after Ticketmaster got involved.

I agree with the single price. I only care what is coming out of my pocket, not how it is distributed. You can report that to me at the end, but when comparing prices I want to see the grand total.

I think the fee for printing the tickets yourself is the one that bugs me the most.  I’m saving them paper and ink and printer usage, and they charge me?