Sigh.

I've been to two live events in 2021, and as I started to get a ticket to a third, I was reminded of a....benefit (?)...of not having bought any tickets in the last year-plus: I spent just about no time in a state of annoyance at terrible organization web sites, ridiculous ticketing policies, and outrageous fees.

I was most of the way into buying a ticket to an event I would really like to attend when I hit one of the latter: $12 to buy an individual ticket on line ($20 if you're buying a subscription). Ticket prices for the event in question range from $25 to $105 and the fee you pay is $12 regardless of whether you're upstairs or downstairs.

So you could pay from 12%-ish to 50%-ish as the fee for your single ticket. I do not think that it costs the organization in question $12 to produce and send you the electronic version of your ticket. Maybe the fee was determined by taking the cost their ticketing system and dividing it by the number of tickets they might sell?

I can afford to pay the $12, but I'm really affronted by it. It's also not in the best interests of the organization to charge this: That $12 fee could keep someone from attending, if they can only afford to buy one low-priced ticket at a time. And of course annoying any of your patrons isn't a good idea: why  annoy audience members, the people you want to buy tickets and give you money and maybe get charitable matches from their employers?

I would really like every organization to reconsider their fees and the potential impact of these fees on ticket sales and good will.