Finland's Consumer Ombudsman is taking ticket seller Lippupiste Oy to the Market Court and demanding a ban on marketing event tickets with a "from" price that leaves out a mandatory order fee. The Consumer Ombudsman also wants a 100,000 euro penalty payment to back the ban, the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority (KKV) said, according to Iltalehti and Yle.
The order fee is 1.50 euros plus 0.65 percent of the order value. According to KKV, Lippupiste doesn't include the fee in the from-prices shown on its website for event tickets. Consumers only learn about the mandatory charge later in the purchase process, in the shopping cart view.
"Consumers must be able to trust that a ticket can be bought at the advertised from-price. Mandatory additional charges cannot be revealed only at the payment stage," Consumer Ombudsman Katri Väänänen said in a statement. Väänänen said Lippupiste's marketing, which goes against the Consumer Protection Act, blurs the consumer's picture of the minimum price at which an event ticket can be bought.
Lippupiste works as a ticket intermediary and markets and sells admission tickets for culture, entertainment and sport events. The company charges service and order fees on top of the ticket's base price, and those fees are part of the ticket's total price. Under the Consumer Protection Act, a trader must state a product's total price including taxes when marketing a specific product with a from-price.
Total price means all costs known to the trader that the consumer cannot avoid paying.
The Consumer Ombudsman and Lippupiste negotiated a resolution, but the company would not change how it states total prices, so the case goes to the Market Court. Väänänen said she hopes the court's ruling will bring clarity to how fees charged in the event ticketing sector are declared and will end practices based on splitting up prices.