The cost of an email

Sending an actual letter containing tickets costs a company money. You have to chop down a tree, cut it real thin, bleach it, press it and then spend money printing ink all over it. Then you’ve got to stuff them in an envelope, stick a stamp on the envelope and put it in the post. I can understand all of this. I can also understand a company might want to charge me for the pleasure and security of receiving hard-copy tickets in the post. But what I can’t understand is why that time-paper-ink-tree-saving process won’t save me any money?

An email is the same as a letter

Ticketmaster is “the world’s leading ticketing company, operating in 19 global markets, providing ticket sales, ticket resale services, marketing and distribution and one of the largest e-commerce sites on the internet, and approximately 6,500 retail outlets; and 20 worldwide call centres.”

They are pretty big fish and probably send out an awful lot of tickets. I’d applaud them for developing a ticketing solution which reduces the amount of letters they have to send out.

Of course, they have developed such a solution and they call it TicketFast®. And it’s pretty Fast®. Instead of opting to receive a pair of tickets in the post, I can choose to receive them as an e-ticket in a PDF via a link in an email. The email arrives Quickly® and works fine, but it costs the same as the letter?! How does that work out? And how do they have the nerve to plaster the A4 e-ticket with adverts? At the very least I should get ad-free tickets if I’ve paid for them?

Try asking them about this via their website and your frustration quickly escalates. It’s not easy; you have to view an existing FAQ and then let them know that FAQ doesn’t answer your question. At which point you can finally ask yours, but not before re-entering all your account info (despite the fact you have to be logged in to ask the question in the first place). Anyway, I worked it out and I asked the question. I’ll let you know what they say. Who knows, it’ll probably have been a business decision…

Summary and comments

I haven’t heard anything from Ticketmaster yet (24 hours later) but who knows, they might come back with something. If they do, I’ll let you know.