When the Convenience Charge is Worth the Convenience

The Dilemma: Friday afternoon at lunchtime, we decided to see The Mummy Returns in the theaters. Showtime is at 7:15 PM. The majority of friends I was going with didn’t get home from work until 6:30, and the movie theater is at least a half hour away. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. But this particular movie marks the opening of the summer blockbuster season. Our chances of getting tickets didn’t look so good.

The Solution: MovieTickets.com to the rescue. Within 5 minutes, I had secured enough tickets for us all to go with no waiting in line, and no worries of sold-out seating. Crisis averted! Good thing, too. If we hadn’t bought the tickets online, the movie would have been sold out by the time we got there.

While buying the tickets, I noticed a $1 convenience charge per ticket. Okay, maybe a little pricey just for a movie ticket, but I really wanted to go. Rather than a convenience fee, I considered it more like an “insurance fee” that I could relax knowing my Friday night plans were safe. So was it worth it? It depends on the situation. When a large group of people decide to go to a huge movie opening night, I say it’s totally worth it. If it’s a lesser-anticipated movie, it’s probably worth waiting in line. The exception to this rule is if you know you won’t have time to wait in line. Again, I think it’s worth the fee to breeze through the door at the theater, bypass the long line, walk up to the ticket kiosk set up just for you, swipe your card, and get your tickets in the nick of time.

Another example is buying concert and theater tickets, except this time, the stakes are larger. Ticketmaster.com charges a whopping $5.25 surcharge per ticket. But here’s a secret… you get almost $5..25 worth of convenience from their site.

While browsing for information on the Broadway show Fosse, I learned it was coming to my town. Now, for someone who doesn’t “do” theater that much, I knew I was in trouble when I heard about choosing a seat. Orchestra? First Dress Circle? Uh-oh. There was no way I could order tickets on the phone and know what seats I was getting. Fortunately, Ticketmaster.com made it easy. I could browse the exact seating chart for the venue, and even get directions to the venue. From there, it was easy to pick where I wanted to sit.

The real lowdown: If you’re not sure whether it’s worth the convenience fee to buy online, it’s as simple as asking yourself one question: was it convenient? Was there a real benefit to buying it online vs. any other way? Does the site in question provide valuable information you probably couldn’t have gotten without some sort of hassle? Questions like these will empower you to be able to recognize when the convenience fee is really worth the convenience.