The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2019
Ticketmaster showed a price — the checkout added the real one, and Canada fined $4.5M
June 2019: Ticketmaster paid $4.5M to settle Canada's drip-pricing case — advertised ticket prices ballooned with mandatory fees revealed only at checkout.
Ticketmaster L.L.C. · 2019-06
What happened
Ticketmaster advertised ticket prices on its Canadian site — and then, stage by stage through the purchase, added mandatory fees: service charges, processing charges, facility charges. The number the fan saw first was not the number the fan paid. Canada's Competition Bureau called the practice by its name: drip pricing, a misleading pricing claim under the Competition Act.
On 27 June 2019, Ticketmaster L.L.C., TNow Entertainment Group and Ticketmaster Canada LP entered a consent agreement: a $4 million penalty plus $500,000 toward the Bureau's investigation costs — $4.5 million in all — and a commitment to bring advertised prices in line with what buyers actually pay, backed by a compliance program.
The case followed Bell Canada's $10 million penalty of 2011 and extended the Bureau's rule from telecom bundles to the digital economy: a price that can only be reached by adding mandatory fees is not a price, it is an opening bid. StubHub would face the same finding eight months later.
Why it happened
- The advertised price was an opening bid: mandatory fees surfaced stage by stage, each one changing the deal.
- Drip pricing exploits the sunk cost of the checkout — by the time the fees appear, the buyer is mid-purchase.
- Canada had already priced this deception at the statutory maximum with Bell; Ticketmaster paid for learning it late.
The lesson
The advertised price must be the payable price: fees that only appear at checkout make every upstream ad misleading, and regulators now treat drip pricing as false advertising, not a fee schedule.
Aftermath
The consent agreement was registered with the Competition Tribunal with the force of a court order, and the Bureau kept going: StubHub settled for $1.3 million in February 2020, and Parliament wrote drip pricing into the Competition Act in 2022.
Sources
- Competition Bureau Canada — Ticketmaster to pay $4.5 million to settle misleading pricing case
- CBC News — Ticketmaster to pay $4.5M for misleading consumers on prices
spotted an error? The club wants to know.
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