Booking Fees: Add Them On or Absorb Them?

Nobody joins a theatre group because they're excited about booking fees. But the moment tickets are ready to go on sale online, somebody has to decide what happens to them. Do you pass the booking fee on to your audience and add it at checkout, or absorb the booking fee into the ticket price? Ask a room full of theatre people and you'll get both answers, usually with more passion than the subject deserves.

Those who'd add it on usually start with fairness. Booking online is a convenience, and the people who use it are the ones who pay for it. Buy a ticket from a cast member or pay on the door and there's no booking fee at all.

And people are used to it. Anyone who has bought a gig ticket, a train ticket or a cinema seat online has seen a booking fee at checkout before. It's hardly going to come as a shock.

Those who'd absorb it start with the person booking. The price on the poster is the price they pay, no surprises. Nobody gets to the last step, sees the total has crept up and sits there with their thumb hovering over the button. Human nature being what it is, that pause is where some people decide they'll sort it out later, and later has a habit of never coming.

Absorbing it also means one price everywhere. A ticket costs the same from the website, from a cast member or on the door, so nobody has to explain why it depends on where you bought it. The poster, the social posts and whatever the cast are telling their friends all say the same number, and that's the number everyone pays.

Then there are the people who just don't like booking fees. They pay them when they have to, because there's usually no choice, but they don't like it, and there's a good chance your group has one. What really grates is when there's no other way to buy. If the only place to get a ticket is online, how is booking online an extra? Surely that's just part of the price. Put them on a committee and they'll argue for absorbing the fee every single time. Anybody who has sat in that meeting will know exactly who that is.

So who's right? Annoyingly, both of them. One camp wants the people who book online to pay for the convenience, the other wants one clean price and no surprises at checkout. Which way a group goes comes down to the people in it, who the audience are, how they're used to buying tickets, even the show itself.

What's worth avoiding is not deciding at all, and just doing whatever was done last time because nobody thought to ask. It's a small setting that changes what every buyer sees at checkout, so it deserves the same five minutes of argument as the ticket price.

Time For A Show won't make that call for you. Add the fee at checkout or include it in the ticket price, that's entirely up to you.