Ticketmaster to refund some fees paid by Cure fans

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Some fans who bought tickets for the English band’s upcoming tour this week paid more in fees than for the tickets themselves.

Fans of The Cure who purchased tickets for the English post-punk band’s upcoming tour through Ticketmaster’s “verified fan” system earlier this week will be partially refunded for some of the transactional fees they paid, group frontman Robert Smith says.

The pay-backs come after controversy erupted Wednesday when some fans who purchased tickets for the band’s upcoming “Shows of a Lost World Tour” — which makes a stop at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield on June 18 — ended up paying more in “service,” “facility,” and “order processing” fees than they did for the tickets themselves.

A viral tweet showing one transaction listed a single ticket at $20, but fees per ticket topped $21. What had been an $80 total for four tickets ended up having a total charge of $172.

Smith voiced outrage himself, posting on Twitter that he was “sickened” by the fee situation, and that musical artists have no way to limit the added charges.

On Thursday evening, however, Smith said in a series of tweets that he was able to speak with the ticket vendor, which “agreed with us that many of the fees being charged are unduly high.”

“As a gesture of goodwill, [Ticketmaster has] offered a $10 per ticket refund to all verified fan accounts for lowest ticket price (‘LTP’) transactions and a $5 per ticket refund to all verified fan accounts for all other ticket price transactions, for all Cure shows at all venues,” Smith wrote.

Fans who had already bought tickets will receive an automatic refund, while tickets sold during Friday’s scheduled general sale will incur lower fees, Smith wrote.

The Cure had intentionally set ticket prices at affordable price points in an attempt to help fans as the price of tickets for other artists has ballooned through Ticketmaster’s platform over the past year.

The company has faced criticism as ticket prices for some acts, including Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, have reached into the thousands through its controversial “dynamic pricing” or “price surging” model.

Smith, earlier this week, called the practice a “greedy scam.”

The band, he said, was also convinced that by using Ticketmaster’s “verified fan” system — where fans pre-register for a chance to be given a code to access ticket sales — would be able to better fight against scalpers.

“We want the tour to be affordable for all fans, and we have a very wide (and we think very fair) range of pricing at every show,” the group wrote in a March 10 post on Twitter. “Our ticketing partners have agreed to help us stop scalpers from getting in the way.”