I don’t know if you saw this over the weekend. Â The Daily News wrote about the excessive fees on Mets (and Yankees) tickets:
A family of Mets fans buying four seats for $84 in Citi Field can pay up to $31.50 in fees above the ticket price, according to the report prepared by Rep. Anthony Weiner‘s office (D-Queens).
Read more in the News.
This is nothing new, and nothing I haven’t brought up around these parts before (I love the convenience fees personally) but it’s nice to see the old style media mentioning it.
Ticketmaster and the Mets or whatever subsidiary they use to sell their tickets ARE essentially ticket scalpers. But then again…the airlines do the same thing, car dealers do the same thing, the government does the same thing. We live in a very deceptive world. Just tell us what we are paying up front, don’t try to pull one over on people.
I prefer paying $7 per ticket in fees from the Mets opposed to the $28 I paid at StubHub (great site though). If there is any complaint on prices, it should be the concession stand prices.
$7 a ticket > $7 for a hot dog.
These ticket fees are absolutely excessive. Buying direct from the Mets box office, they charge a $5/ticket fee. That’s preposterous, and insulting. I’ll also add that while they may have lowered the prices on some tickets this past off-season, they DOUBLED the fees for each ticket purchased outside a plan (from $2.50 to $5.00, i believe). I’d be curious to see the math–my guess is that its close to a wash between the 2009 and 2010 prices. Now, as a season ticket holder, I don’t have to pay any fees when I buy extra tickets (a perk that I must say makes me feel good about the decision to invest in my team), but I think its another example of this team being cheap and deceptive towards its fans.
And BG, just as a side note, it wasn’t till this past week that I realized how good we have it, when I went to yankee stadium twice (once to root against the Phils, once for the Mets). Our $6 hot dogs came out on stale buns, no saurkraut available, a burger burnt to a crisp (seriously, my dad gave me a bite of his, it tasted like a dehydrated veggie burger. I saw that domestic beers were $9 compared to the $7 we pay in queens (though still better then the $10.25 that I payed for a Budweiser at Skydome last month–$11.00 tickets, $10.25 beer). Citi Field’s food options really are terrific compared to almost every other ballpark I’ve been to (maybe except for the outfield BBQ at Camden Yards, yum!).
Also, we were in section 309 yesterday, and could not see the right field corner, so its not just the Mets who have “obstructed views”.
Ethan, yeah Fake New Yankee Stadium also has some sightline issues….I posted a few last year.
mostly the days of randomly going to a game and walking up and buying a ticket are gone. If you wanna go last minute, you pay the fees. If not, plan it out, and buy the tickets at the game. No fees to buy tickets at Citi Field, and you get the bonus of actually being able to discuss where you’re sitting and pick RF over LF or maybe a section over for 8 rows down, etc.
Except now if you go to a game at Citifield, the Mets have jacked up the prices of the lower seats SO much that the upper deck is the only area that will ever sell out… show up last minute and you are stuck with $90 Mezzanine equivalent tickets… oh boy.