Texas lawmakers look to combat hidden ticket fees
AUSTIN (Texas) — For the Final Four in San Antonio, tickets can be found as low at $250 on Ticketmaster -- kind of. After getting to checkout, the price goes up to $301.45, a extra $51.45 in fees and taxes. On StubHub, a $328 ticket actually costs $446.50, and on SeatGeek, a $358 ticket costs $477.
State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, and State Rep. Ben Bumgarner, R-Roanoke, have both introduced identical bills (SB 1820 and HB 3621) to make the price of the ticket include any fees from the beginning.
"Everybody knows what its like to try to buy a ticket that says its $50, and then when it's time to check out, that $50 ticket is a $150 ticket," Ian Lee, managing director of the Ticket Sellers Association, said. "What's important about this bill is it guarantees the price you see is the price you pay at the end."
The bill also takes aim at ticket companies restricting what a buyer does with their ticket after they've purchased it. Currently, ticket companies can, but don't always, prevent users from reselling their tickets on other platforms, prevent users from reselling tickets on their platform for profit and prevent free transfers of a ticket.
"Retailers have gotten so much power that they're kind of reconceiving the whole notion of what a ticket is," Johnson said. "They're making it a permission slip subject to their control at all times and they've got the market power to do it, which, in my view, is a distortion of how the market should be functioning."
Lee highlighted a 2019 incident where ticket purchasers were turned away at the doors of a Black Keys concert because the artist didn't allow tickets purchased through any platform except Ticketmaster.
"If I bought a ticket six months ago, [and] turns out Grandma's sick, I'm not allowed to give that ticket away or resell it so I don't take a total loss," Lee said.
However, Ticketmaster says this legislation would encourage scalping and raise prices.
"This bill will hurt music fans and their wallets by outlawing fan-to-fan face value ticket exchanges. We believe artists — not scalpers — should be able to decide how their tickets are resold, including having the right to use tools that set price caps and protect their fans from predatory price gouging on resale. This bill, however, seeks to take that right away, putting control in the hands of scalpers instead of looking out for the best interests of the artist and fan," a representative from Ticketmaster said in a statement.
They did levy support for eliminating hidden fees from ticketing.
"Ticketmaster has long advocated for a nationwide mandate and was the first ticketing company to support all-in pricing laws in New York, Tennessee, Connecticut, California, Maryland, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota and North Carolina. In Texas and other states where this isn’t law, Ticketmaster gives fans a Price Toggle that can display the all-in price on any event," they said.
Ticketmaster also says the artist or sports team is in control of how a ticket can be resold, not the company.