I'm getting increasingly pissed off with 'booking fees'

[QuimReaper]

In this day and age what possible justification is there for companies to charge 'admin fees' and 'booking fees' when you're already paying through the fucking nose for the ticket price and every part of the process is entirely automated?

I've just booked two tickets for an event at The Roundhouse in London, and I had to pay £5.88 for EACH ticket, as well as some nonsense calling itself a 'Restoration Levy' (WTF?!) of a further £2 per ticket, meaning I paid almost an additional £16 on top of the ticket price.

It's been getting on my nerves with cinemas too lately, where increasingly you don't even have human contact to collect the fucking things, you use a touch screen and a booking reference.

Surely these ridiculous extra charges are completely outdated and due to be phased out?

I agree and also the admin charges from insurance companies where you've done all the leg work and provided all the details to them.

And the tickets aren't even tickets any more, they're just automated emails!

I work in admin relating to events and completely understand that there are costs relating to managing bookings even when there are no printed tickets or human interaction in the booking process. But to my mind these are just costs that should be built in to the ticket price. Particularly where there is no way to avoid the booking fee and the 'booking fee' is payable per ticket (not per booking, which could cover multiple tickets.

It's clearly just a way to be able to advertise a lower price then hope that customers have committed before they see the real price. Loads of places seem to advertise a lower price for tickets bought online in advance and then add on a booking fee per ticket for online bookings. Surely that just means that the online advance price is higher than advrtised?

I work for a company that uses a lot of automation.

The software companies charge a £ to the company based on number of transactions. So if you receive an automated email, the company pays the software supplier a fee. 1,000 emails will have a cost to them. Automation is surprisingly expensive although you get faster processes and no bad attitude from the robots.

I agree with you though. Companies should advertise "all in" fees upfront rather than a headline price which doubles at checkout.