Class action lawsuits are not a swift or lucrative route to consumer justice, but at least they force companies to pay for the ways they’ve wronged their customers over the years. For example, you may not have received an e-mail about it, but if you have a Ticketmaster account, you might have vouchers for free tickets waiting for you right now.
Ticketmaster, for example, has raked in far more than $45 million in fees over the last decade and a half, but at least this is a few tickets’ worth of justice. The lawsuit was over Ticketmaster’s fees, including marking up the fee for UPS delivery of tickets.
The lawsuit also alleged that the Order Processing Fee charged on ticket purchases actually has somethign to do with the company’s expenses to process orders, when it doesn’t. The fee, the lawsuit claims, “was not based on those costs and was actually a profit generator which Ticketmaster required customers to pay.”
This has been a long-running class action: we’ve reported on possible settlements in the case since January of 2011, and a final settlement was approved earlier this year. Ticketmaster has quietly slipped free ticket vouchers and discount codes into the accounts of eligible customers.
I have the codes in my account, but received no notification e-mails, or they might have slipped into my spam folder. To find out whether you have any, go to the “[Your Name]’s Account” link after logging in, then scroll down to the “Your Vouchers” item on the left and click on it. Depending on how many tickets you purchased during the affected period (October 21, 1999 to February 27, 2013) you could have multiple discount codes and sets of tickets.
There are a few problems with this settlement: one is that you probably aren’t still using the Yahoo Mail address you were using in 2001. The attorneys thought of that, and there’s a place on the lawsuit site to register your old e-mail addresses that you might have used to buy tickets in the past.
The question remains where you can actually use these tickets, since the site that the company set up to display events where you can use those vouchers doesn’t actually work yet. Whoops.
Curt Schlesinger et al. v. Ticketmaster [Lawsuit Site] (via Gawker)
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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