Service Charges

I bought tickets for Robert Plant’s upcoming tour this week. This was the first time I have used Amazon’s ticket service and I for the most part it was reasonably easy to use even though it took me ten attempts to get the tickets booked having been logged in on the dot of 9am when they were released. From what I can tell, their procedures do appear to have made a reasonable effort to tackle touts but I am pretty sure that some tickets will find their way on to the usual outlets with heavy mark-ups from their original price.

One thing that I did found odd is that Amazon listed the administration service charge separately from the ticket price. Many ticket vendors do this but the odd thing was that Amazon quoted the full transaction price up front and I really didn’t need to know that their cut was a fairly hefty £8.50. They don’t do this with anything else – what you see is what you pay (accepting delivery charges, of course). I can only imagine that they wanted to offer a fairly presented product but somehow felt obliged to compare to Ticketmaster and the like by showing what the mark up would have been.

I don’t object to paying for a service but I find the concept of the “service charge” to be underhand and devious. I also experienced this a few weeks ago when buying our new car. The dealer included a service charge of £99 for “administration” but as far as I am concerned this should have been included on the list price of the car. They also included a charge of £20 for diesel which is reasonable to a point as you have to drive the thing away but I’m fairly certain that there wasn’t £20 of diesel in the tank or else they were going by breakdown rates and including a service charge with that as well.

I find the whole concept of compulsory extra charges that are not variable nor in any way avoidable to be a highly dishonest practice but I wonder whether anyone could reasonably put a stop to it? Advertising standards, anyone?