Biden to ‘Crack Down’ on ‘Hidden Junk’ Fees for Concerts + More

Even President Joe Biden is tired of hidden fees, especially when it comes to concerts, and he has now requested his administration work to eliminate these fees from the purchasing experience.

We’ve all been there — you scout the seating map, put a couple of tickets in your cart and by the time you’ve reached the checkout page, suddenly the total price has jumped quite a bit higher than the original listed price indicated you’d be paying.

There’s oftentimes multiple fees associated with a purchase and, sometimes, you even have to pay to print out a ticket in your own home, from your own computer with your own printer, paper and ink, connected through the internet you pay for.

On Twitter, President Biden followed up his Oct. 26 speech, which broached this topic, by saying these “hidden junk fees” are a “pain,” adding that they’re “unfair, deceptive and add up.”

His hope is that his administration can resolve one of the most common complaints associated with the user experience of buying tickets, as well as other goods and services in order to “put that money back in your pocket.” Other hidden/junk fees include “surprise banking overdraft fees, excessive credit card late fees, hidden hotel booking fees, or those huge termination charges to stop you from switching cable and Internet plans to a better deal.”

“Last week, the Federal Trade Commission started work on a rule to crack down on unfair and deceptive fees across all industries, fees that were never disclosed — never disclosed. And there was no way to avoid the fee, like processing fees for concert tickets or like resort fees. When you think you’re paying one price to book a hotel, you only find out after checking out that there’s a ‘resort fee’ you never heard about that’s added to your bill,” said the President in part of that speech.

Of course, with concert ticket prices now ranging between a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars quite regularly, who is to say these fees won’t simply be added to the original advertised price rather than eliminated altogether? In previous years (when $100 per concert ticket was more of a rarity than the standard), that fee sometimes added an additional 10 to 20 percent of the original ticket cost (and a larger percentage regarding lesser ticket prices).

Now, that same monetary fee makes up a smaller percentage of the ticket price, therefore it, theoretically is not as big of a purchase deterrent.

The President is not the only active member of the U.S. government to take issue with the current concert experience, from purchasing a ticket to attending events. U.S. representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey issued a public call for the anti-monopolistic breakup of Live Nation, the global concert promoter that also owns Ticketmaster and countless venues.

“About 200 deaths and 750 injuries occurred at Live Nation events since 2006,” Pascrell told New York Post earlier this year, demanding the company be held accountable “just like any other business.”

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