One morning last week with toast in one hand, coffee in the other, BBC breakfast were interviewing a spokesperson for the airline industry. The said spokesperson was being asked to justify the service charges being levied on people buying airline tickets online. The presenters were asking why people were being charged so much when they had already bought a ticket for over £100. The spokesperson responded by saying that they are just passing the fees charged by the Banks onto the customer. The presenters then asked why the airline industry, and certain other industries like Theatre Tickets, used service charges when other industries do not. The spokesperson then came out with some drivel about transparent pricing...
So what about Theatre Tickets? Why do we charge a service charge?
As the Web Developer for theatredelicatessen, and the founder of RapidTicketing, I have quite an inside view into online sales and Bank charges. Our current checkout provider - Google Checkout - charge 3.4% of the transaction amount + 20p per transaction. For a £12 ticket (plus a 50p service charge) this amounts to a fee of 63p. If you then multiply this by an average years audience of around 1500 people, this 63p becomes £945.
This shows that it would cost theatredelicatessen nearly 100 tickets worth of money by offering tickets online if they did not add a service charge. They could, of course, just make all tickets £12.50 and then not charge a service charge. But then people buying tickets on the door would be paying for a service that they were not using.
Product based industries deal in fixed commodities. If you sell laptops, you know how much each of the components cost. You know how much it will cost to build the laptops and how much to ship them. You're dealing with a lot of knowns. Then when you come to sell the laptop, you have as long as you like to be able to sell it. You can reduce the price right down to the cost of the components and still break even.
In service industries, where tickets are sold for specific time slots, there are a lot of unknowns. How much, per ticket that you may sell, does each of the components cost? Without knowing how many tickets you will sell you cannot know this. When you price your ticket, there is a lot of guesswork. You want to make your ticket as cheap as possible in order to sell enough tickets as possible. By adding the service charge into the price of the tickets you may put people off and this will not help you reach your goal of breaking even, especially if people can still buy tickets at the door to avoid a service charge.
In short, the service charge levied on Theatre Tickets, by our service at least, is a transparent means of recovering the costs of providing an online ticketing system to the public, whilst making tickets available on the door at the lowest price possible. Others (sounds like "ticket vaster") may charge £2 per ticket and then £1.80 to collect the said ticket, but that would just be profiteering!
Does theatre make money from Service Charges?
July 26th, 2009 by Paul Loy
One morning last week with toast in one hand, coffee in the other, BBC breakfast were interviewing a spokesperson for the airline industry. The said spokesperson was being asked to justify the service charges being levied on people buying airline tickets online. The presenters were asking why people were being charged so much when they had already bought a ticket for over £100. The spokesperson responded by saying that they are just passing the fees charged by the Banks onto the customer. The presenters then asked why the airline industry, and certain other industries like Theatre Tickets, used service charges when other industries do not. The spokesperson then came out with some drivel about transparent pricing...
So what about Theatre Tickets? Why do we charge a service charge?
As the Web Developer for theatredelicatessen, and the founder of RapidTicketing, I have quite an inside view into online sales and Bank charges. Our current checkout provider - Google Checkout - charge 3.4% of the transaction amount + 20p per transaction. For a £12 ticket (plus a 50p service charge) this amounts to a fee of 63p. If you then multiply this by an average years audience of around 1500 people, this 63p becomes £945.
This shows that it would cost theatredelicatessen nearly 100 tickets worth of money by offering tickets online if they did not add a service charge. They could, of course, just make all tickets £12.50 and then not charge a service charge. But then people buying tickets on the door would be paying for a service that they were not using.
Product based industries deal in fixed commodities. If you sell laptops, you know how much each of the components cost. You know how much it will cost to build the laptops and how much to ship them. You're dealing with a lot of knowns. Then when you come to sell the laptop, you have as long as you like to be able to sell it. You can reduce the price right down to the cost of the components and still break even.
In service industries, where tickets are sold for specific time slots, there are a lot of unknowns. How much, per ticket that you may sell, does each of the components cost? Without knowing how many tickets you will sell you cannot know this. When you price your ticket, there is a lot of guesswork. You want to make your ticket as cheap as possible in order to sell enough tickets as possible. By adding the service charge into the price of the tickets you may put people off and this will not help you reach your goal of breaking even, especially if people can still buy tickets at the door to avoid a service charge.
In short, the service charge levied on Theatre Tickets, by our service at least, is a transparent means of recovering the costs of providing an online ticketing system to the public, whilst making tickets available on the door at the lowest price possible. Others (sounds like "ticket vaster") may charge £2 per ticket and then £1.80 to collect the said ticket, but that would just be profiteering!
One week in….
July 16th, 2009 by Josh Cass
And if we were actually riding the Tour de France we would be somewhere around Arcalis by now, as it is, we have just got the first week under our belt.
And the overwhelming feeling? A sense that audiences might actually be enjoying the show as much as we are performing it. Going into a project like this which has such a specialist area of interest and such a strong focus on the look and style of it, it was a concern, well... at least to me, that audiences would find it difficult to relate to, but so far so good! We've got a long way to go before Paris though!
Press Night Here We Come
July 14th, 2009 by Alexander Guiney
Just waking up on the morning (ish) of press night with only one thought on my mind. Well a lot more than that actually. Just thinking back to when we started this process, and how crazy it is to be playing someone as well known as Lance Armstrong! The most interesting thing about trying to figure what he is all about is the fact that I don't think I have ever come across a more polarizing figure: nobody is ambivalent about Lance, people either generally love or loath him. Really looking forward to tonight, but a couple of things that I need to take care of first: checking lines, running the fight a bunch with Marco-It's-Tom-Daplyn-Really-Pantani, shaving my legs...
A tough job, but as the head of acting at Webber used to say, "it's better than getting slapped in the eye with a wet Haddock"
she is from Stoke you see.
And on that note, a little bit of Lance's musical tastes du jour:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QQ0hH4MYsk
Wish us luck!
Alex (Lance)
End of the tale…
May 12th, 2009 by jessica
I'm starting this blog a little late in the day, but it's been such a manic few months juggling a baby, stab wounds, and a massive Shakespeare production (3.5hrs with cuts, oops), this is the first time I've had a break to think...
Well what a learning experience this has been. A couple of critics suggested The Winter's Tale was not the right Shakespeare play for such a young company on a fringe time scale. In part I agree. I totally ran out of time to really explore any of the scenes. However, this wasn't disastrous, and the preparation we did at the beginning of rehearsals and some very good casting (I'm in complete agreement with Sam Mendes when he says that 80% of your work is done in choosing the right actors) meant the actors really knew what they were doing.
Over the next few days I'm going to share what I've learned, what really worked well in terms of rehearsal exercises, what didn't, and how I think I will approach the next text I work on...
You… Me… and the space
May 11th, 2009 by Roland Smith
theatredelicatessen at Cavendish Gate, 295 Regent Street
Over the next few months I am going to be writing about the new theatredelicatessen production Pedal Pusher.
It is mainly an experiment, to record the process and share it with people who may be interested in the behind the scenes. It will also be a chance to read about how the theatredelicatessen process works, should they want to collaborate with us in the future. Partly it is simply to publicise our work.
If there is anything you would like to know, drop me a line.
