Justify the box office charges.
Anonymous submitted on
Friday 29th March 2019
Complete
Please explain why is it that some society events have to pay a booking fee of £3.50, whilst others pay none?! I understand 50p is needed to cover the cost of the transaction, allegedly, so how come some societies (namely Surge Radio Awards) do not have to pay a booking for their tickets on the Box Office. By charging so much SUSU is monopolising student events, and making money where they should not. You are charging students the priviledge of going to an event, on top of the cost of the event, on top of the cost of society membership.
Responses
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Students' Union replied on
Friday 31st May 2019 11:45am
Hi, thank you for your query. I've been in touch with the team who are involved with the Box Office, and this was their response:
Box office fees apply to all tickets, regardless of department. This is to cover the costs associated with being able to facilitate this service for student events which includes, staffing, ticket printing, transaction processing fees etc. Usually, the customer pays the fee, but sometimes event organisers can opt to absorb the cost of the fee within their ticket price. For example, a customer may be charged £5 for an event, but the owner of that event will only receive £4.50 of the income, as SUSU will deduct the fee. This is roughly 10% of ticket price, but capped at £5 for tickets costing £50+. This is communicated by the events team to anyone who requests for tickets to be put onto the Box Office so that they are aware. The SURGE awards should have had a fee added on, this was human error and was rectified before the tickets went off sale.
I hope that this answers your query, and if you have any more questions, please get in touch via vpdci@susu.org.
Many thanks,
Evie Reilly (VP DCI)
Actions
Forwarded to Creative Industries
Friday 29th Mar 2019 1:25pm
Comments
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I can't understand what you mean by "costs of box office" exactly. Is this the charge that students pay to buy these tickets, or is it the charge that societies pay per transaction? I can clearly see the cost of the SURGE Awards is £5.00 + £0.50 booking fee.
Union groups are entirely funded by the Union and their budgeting is approved by their relevant Union coordinators, so if you mean the charge that societies pay per transaction for their events then charging Union groups just means SUSU charges itself. Which is silly.
Regardless of the fact Surge is a union group, If the union can seemingly absorb the costs of box office for union groups, why can it not do the same for affilicated societies which are forced to use box office to pay membership fees.
