PreferredSeat.com Blog

Ticket service charges are nothing new for concert fans who have had to deal with Ticketmaster’s service charges and the service charges added to tickets that are resold by ticket brokers and fans alike.  And there’s no escaping it unless you are a season ticket holder or have access to the venue box office.

But you can save money by avoiding ticket sites that hide their service fees, because as you can imagine they do it for a reason.

Sports fans and theater goers have the same problem with ticket fees adding up to 25% or the ticket price from primary sellers like Ticketmaster. And the fees ticket brokers add can increase the price of a ticket by several hundred percent, or in some cases ticket brokers sell tickets without a service fee and even below face value if the market demands it.

Ticketmaster has started showing the total ticket price up front for many but not all events they sell tickets for, and they show how the service fees add to the price of the ticket. And that is a good start, but the biggest complaint from fans is the excessive price they charge for the service they provide, and Ticketmaster chooses to ignore this fact.

A majority of the tickets sold online have hidden fees and most of them use the same method to hide them. Stubhub resells ticket broker tickets for the most part and adds an additional 10% to the cost of the tickets only after you enter your personal information. In additon the tickets may already be marked up by 15% or more.

Most ticket brokers online use one of several checkout systems that add a hefty service charge only after you choose the shipping method. It makes it hard for consumers to determine the best price even when most of the tickets sites have the very same tickets.

There are a few ticket brokers that do not have any hidden fees or service charges. The price of the ticket may very well be above the face value as determined by the market, just as anything else you buy. But you can find tickets online without any hidden fees.

PreferredSeat.com is one of those ticket brokers that believes that by providing the total cost of each ticket up front consumers can make a better choice without having to spend 5 minutes on each site trying to figure out just how much that ticket really will cost in the end.  When you have the cheapest ticket prices as PreferredSeat.com has, you don’t have to hide anything.