Canada’s Commissioner of Competition raised the stakes this week in its fight to stop Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment Inc. from using what it calls a “deceptive ticket pricing practice.”
In a new filing with the Competition Tribunal, the Commissioner of Competition challenged a previous claim from the companies that it is standard in e-commerce to advertise ticket prices without including applicable service fees, facility charges and processing fees that are tacked on later when consumers make a payment.
“Any bald suggestion that consumers would somehow be able to divine the actual cost of tickets before the Respondents choose to reveal them is simply incorrect,” wrote the Commissioner in its filing. “Many other e-commerce companies, when promoting other products to consumers, present prices that are in fact attainable as the first price consumers see.”
The battle between the entertainment Goliaths and the Canadian watchdog agency has been raging since January of this year when the Commissioner of Competition asked the tribunal to end alleged deceptive ticket pricing and demanded that sports and entertainment ticket vendors review their marketing practices and display the full price of tickets up front.
At the time, the Commissioner alleged that Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s pricing methods meant consumers are sometimes charged between 20% and 65% more than what the tickets were initially advertised to cost.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation did not immediately respond to a request from the Canadian Press for comment, but have staunchly fought the claims, saying the commissioner is either misunderstanding or misconstruing the ticket process and stressing that its practices are “standard in the ticketing industry, transparent, pro-consumer and proper.”
“Ticketmaster never suggests or implies that there are no fees associated with a consumer’s purchase. The opposite is true,” it said in a response that it filed with the Tribunal. “Consumers who purchase tickets online are aware that they will pay fees above the unit price of a ticket.”
