Booking Fees - what are they for!

ATG are not shy about charging a booking fee, but I don't think I've ever seen them go over £4. Also how are ATG selling Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, is it not a Young Vic production in a Nimax theatre? If you've not got a deal or a discount, always go directly to the source (so YV or Nimax in this case, NOT ATG!). I'd be intrigued to know more about where you're going to book this so I can see for myself where this £17.50 has come from. I've had large fees from some of the agencies in my greener days, but this sounds OTT even for ATG.

Delfont Mackintosh do charge booking fees, they just roll them into the upfront ticket cost at first then break it down when you come to pay.

Broadly, booking fees are listed separately to ticket costs because ticket costs go towards the production (and lining the producers' wallets) and booking fees go to the building itself, for upkeep and FOH staff and the like, so they have to separate them or it's an unholy mess. I mean it's somewhat more complex than that, but that's as detailed as I get at midnight on a school night I'm afraid.

Okay, I'm on an actual website now, I see it very well. ATG are charging super high fees for this one, presumably because they're acting as a ticket broker rather than having anything to actually do with the production.

If you're looking to buy a theatre ticket and have not found a discount or a deal, always always always go to the official website so that you at least don't get ripped off. If the show or theatre has its own website, great. If not, figure out which company owns the theatre, and go to their website, so in this case Nimax.

If you just google, say, "cat on a hot tin roof tickets" (which I just did), you get a bunch of ticketing agencies with the Young Vic tucked away as the fifth link down (though the first one which doesn't say "ad" next to it). The ticketing agencies (who will charge higher fees than the producers) are depending on us not being smart enough to figure out the actual best way to buy tickets, hence buying ads so they get placed so prominently, and I think it's weird that ATG shows on this list but Nimax doesn't, and also almost weirdly sneaky that ATG has the word "official" in their link heading. I'm sure it's just the default for their website, but it does have the power to suggest that everyone else is a charlatan and ATG are single-handedly responsible for this production.

(Sometimes you might have to go through an agency if a show is completely sold out through the official channels; always check these agencies are STAR-affiliated, and sorry about the booking fee, but these should be treated as a last resort anyway.)

Anyway! Hope this has proven useful to some and not too preaching-to-the-choir to everyone else. If in doubt, come back to TheatreBoard and ask questions, we're reasonably friendly and probably have a few hundred years worth of ticket-booking experience between us so will always be on hand to help guide anyone through any of the weirder looking websites.

It does strike me as sneaky the way ATG have listed this. I too struggled to locate the young vic site on google hidden away behind brokerages.
On top of Baemax very well put explanation I would add that often the site related to the production or the theatre its in will have a better selection of seats

Re the high booking fees on ATG for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - if you look closely, it's actually the website of Love Theatre (an ATG-owned brand) under the banner of ATG. This usually happens when ATG or Sonia Friedman (also part of ATG) have producing stakes in shows that aren't in ATG theatres, in the same way that you'll find tickets for The Ferryman and The Book of Mormon on ATG's site. Love Theatre are a fully fledged agency in their own right, hence the significantly higher booking fees as with other agents, it does just cause some confusion as it appears to be the ATG website itself.


Re the call centres, most West End theatres now use booking centres - ATG of course have their own, Nimax use Quay Tickets who are owned and run by The Lowry up in Salford, RUT use See. I think Delfont Mackintosh have their own. The phone numbers you generally find listed on the internet will link you to the call centres, however the box offices themselves all will have phone numbers out there listed somewhere, if you can find them it's really handy for getting hold of the theatre when you need to, even if they can't help with booking tickets

As for what booking fees are for, hopefully I can shed some light. It can vary from show to show but generally speaking a production will first and foremost pay rent to the theatre (not always the case on tour). There will then be a "split" of the ticketing revenue, usually in the ballpark of 75/25 between the producer and the theatre owner, always in the producer's favour. There often is also what's called a "first/second call". So if the first call is £40,000 to the producer, the first £40k of ticket sales goes to the producer. If the second call is £25k, after the £40k has been paid, the next £25k will go to the theatre owner. After this it reverts to the split. There can also be a guarantee - this is most common when subsidised theatre is touring. If there's a guarantee of £50,000, then no matter what ticketing revenue is made, the producer is guaranteed £50k. It can then move on to the calls/split after that. The point being, with potential guarantees and calls, it's perfectly plausible (and regularly happens) that a touring theatre can host a show for a week and make no money at all, because the guarantee/call figures haven't been met. The exception to this is house seats. The theatre keeps 100% of the revenue of house seats which is why you will rarely find them discounted for groups or otherwise, and often they'll have VIP packages attached.

It can be a little different in London - as a general rule, rent is paid, and the producers will take most or all of the ticket revenue until they recoup the initial investment costs, after which the usual split kicks in.

So booking/transaction fees are a guaranteed income for the theatre owner, they keep 100% of it, hence why they're often high. Though as has been previously discussed, many producers/ticket agents/theatre owners are now officially charging no booking fees, but adding an extra clause into the deal so that they keep a percentage that equates to what the booking fee would be. In effect, what was previously a £50 seat with a 5% fee is now a £52.50 seat with no fees, and a clause in the contract for the seller to retain 5%, independent of the aforementioned guarantees/calls etc.

And of course agencies have to mark up again to make their cut.

Add in bars/kiosks/merchandise and there's your income as a theatre operator!

Hope that proves interesting, and sorry if it's patronising if you already knew all that!

If the revenue for house seats goes to the theatre then how come producers can reserve house seats for people at reduced rates/free?

Had a look at booking for WNO's "From the House of the Dead" today at New Theatre Oxford - there were some decent £20 seats at the back. But only way of booking is through ATG Tickets who whacked on an obscene £7.90 booking fee (£3.90 ticket fee + £4.00 transaction fee). So 40% extra on the ticket price. Had a whinge on twitter and the theatre responded that I could avoid the fees by booking in person, but decided I couldn't be arsed with that.

Gawd the pains of our ticket lives! Sometimes the booking fee has cost me more than the train fare 😣

Next time, let me know and I can wander down to the Box Office for you.  It is only 10 mins walk for me.

I would have thought that dealing with someone face to face is actually more expensive in terms of Box Office costs than letting things process online.  The one thing that rarely emerges is the fact that the visiting company quite often has to pay for the cost of each ticket printed.  Last time I was working on a show at the New, that was about 25p plus VAT per ticket sold.  So they are fleecing both the consumer and the producers for the same transaction.  Plus they keep the income from the first 12 tickets sold at each performance (in addition to reserving house seats that can generate no income for producers) - and, of course, all credit card transaction charges are paid by the producers rather than the theatre....

Then you have other theatres (looking at you Oxford Playhouse) that hide the booking fee in the ticket price.  They have recently upped that from £1 to £2 - whilst at the same time taking away Senior Citizen discounts.  So a £22 ticket is only worth a maximum of £20 to the visiting company - less, of course, once ticket printing and credit card charges and anything else.

There should be absolute transparency on these things.  Upfront and with a clear explanation of how you can avoid some or all of the charges (such as by going to the Box Office in person)

There probably should be a national investigation into the ways Box Offices are run.  We have had the investigation into secondary ticket sellers - which has shown up the dodgy dealings there.  But it is time to look at the venues themselves and draw up basic rules that protect consumers.

I guess staffing a building is pretty much a given so doesn't feel to the theatres like an additional cost in the way that keeping a website up to date and paying transaction fees does. If they want the building open from, say, 10am until whenever, then they have to have staff there anyway, so an in-person transaction isn't really an additional cost, just the staff member who's already there doing a particular aspect of their job. I'm not sure how a cash purchase is more expensive than a card purchase though, once you take the staffing question out of the equation?

A cash purchase requires someone to deal with the customer face to face - going through options, dealing with the frequent indecision, processing the purchase, printing the tickets and handing them over. It is quite often not a quick process. Then you have to have someone to cash up at the end of the day, reconcile the figures, deal with the banking etc.

Yes, some of those tasks can be done by other staff members - but don't underestimate the costs of staffing when it comes to specific box office tasks.

To my mind, it is one of the necessities of running a theatre - along with providing stage door staff to run the other key access point to the building. And some theatres now charge visiting companies extra to provide someone to let actors and crew into the building for performances!

It is almost as if theatres would love it if they didn't have shows and didn't have audiences - they could be so much more efficient!

Also when the hidden fees go up (as has just happened here in Oxford), it looks like the visiting companies are raising their prices - whereas it is the theatre management that is doing so. It is all so misleading. And infuriating when theatre hire charges go up year after year - without any reference to anything close to the various accepted inflation figures - but ticket price inflation is discouraged so as not to alienate audiences.

I'm not seeing the problem with that. What matters to the customer is the total amount they have to pay. Where the money goes afterwards is irrelevant. It's not as if you can haggle over each component of the total cost. You have to pay what you have to pay.

It pisses me off when I don't get the total cost up front. I occasionally buy things through US websites and there I often don't find out the actual amount I'm being charged until after the payment has gone through because additional charges and taxation are left out of the listed price.