The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2022–2024
Cineplex advertised a ticket price, then added a fee at checkout — Canada fined it $38.9M
Cineplex charged a $1–$1.50 fee never shown in its ticket price. Canada's Tribunal called it drip pricing, fined it the full amount collected.
Cineplex · 2024-09-23
What happened
Starting in June 2022, Cineplex — Canada's largest cinema chain — began charging an 'online booking fee' of $1.00 to $1.50 on tickets bought through its website or app, with the exact amount depending on whether the customer belonged to its Scene Plus loyalty program. The fee was not included in the ticket price shown to shoppers before checkout.
Canada's Competition Bureau sued, arguing the practice was 'drip pricing' — advertising a price that isn't actually available and adding mandatory charges only at the final step. On 23 September 2024 the Competition Tribunal ruled against Cineplex, applying the Competition Act's recently added drip-pricing provision for the first time.
The Tribunal ordered Cineplex to pay $38.9 million — the full amount the company had collected from the fee between June 2022 and December 2023 — plus a share of the Bureau's legal costs, and barred Cineplex from similar practices for ten years. Cineplex appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal, which affirmed the Tribunal's decision.
Why it happened
- The advertised price customers saw while choosing a showtime never included the booking fee, so the number that drove the purchase decision was not the number charged at the end.
- Splitting the fee by loyalty-program status added a second layer of price opacity on top of the first, making the true cost harder to predict before checkout.
- The fee ran for eighteen months before enforcement caught it, during which every ticket sold under the practice became part of the penalty the Tribunal later calculated.
The lesson
A price advertised without a fee added later isn't a technicality — regulators now size the penalty to match what was collected. Drip pricing just moves the bill from marketing to litigation.
Aftermath
The ruling was the first application of Canada's new drip-pricing provision and became a reference case cited against other Canadian companies, including a separate 2025 Competition Bureau case against Canada's Wonderland over mandatory processing fees excluded from headline prices.
Sources
- Competition Bureau Canada — Competition Bureau wins deceptive marketing case against Cineplex
- CBC News — Cineplex says it will appeal $38.9M fine over $1.50 online booking fee
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