It started with a C$1.50 booking fee. It ended with a C$38.9 million penalty.
Canada's Competition Tribunal ordered Cineplex to pay the penalty after ruling that the chain's online ticket prices were misleading, because the mandatory fee wasn't shown with the advertised price. The Federal Court of Appeal upheld the decision in January 2026, and Cineplex has since asked the Supreme Court of Canada to hear a further appeal.
It's a Canadian case about a cinema, but the UK, the US, the EU and Australia all have their own rules on how booking fees are shown, and regulators are paying close attention to ticketing.
Most venues won’t need to change what they charge. What matters is where the fee shows up and how it’s explained. Fees can feel like a problem for the finance team, but for your visitors the price is part of the experience. Seeing the real cost from the first click makes booking simpler, fairer and more welcoming.
Why regulators are cracking down on drip pricing
Researchers working with StubHub ran a large field experiment comparing fees shown upfront with fees revealed at checkout. Buyers who only saw fees at the end spent about 21% more and were 14% more likely to complete a purchase. They also went back to compare other listings more often, which suggests late fees make prices harder to compare.
That's the behaviour these rules are designed to stop. Venues have more riding on this than a resale platform does. A resale buyer might never come back, but your audience books with you season after season, and a price that doesn't change between browsing and payment helps build the kind of trust that keeps them coming back.
The rules in each market
Each market has its own law and regulator, and the detail differs from one to the next. The table below links to each, so you can go straight to the source. Your legal adviser can tell you exactly how they apply to your venue, and once you know the approach you need, CultureSuite gives you the tools to put it into practice.
The rules are being enforced. The CMA fined StubHub £889,200 in 2026, the ACCC penalised Dendy Cinemas in 2025, and New York's law has led to class actions against venues.
The fiddly part: booking fees charged per order
Per-ticket fees are relatively simple. Some ticketing systems can roll a per-ticket charge into the ticket price while keeping it separate in your accounts.
Per-order fees are harder. A booking fee charged once per order isn't attached to any single ticket, so venues have a choice to make about how to show it. Broadly, there are two approaches:
Include the fee in every ticket price.
A £20 ticket with a £5 per-order fee is shown as £25, wherever it appears. Visitors see one number from the what’s on page to checkout, and nobody has to do the maths. The trade-off is that your website prices won’t match prices printed elsewhere unless you update those too. There’s also a knock-on effect to explain: someone booking two of those tickets pays £45, not £50, because the fee is only charged once. The advertised price is what a single ticket costs, and booking more only brings the cost per ticket down.
Show the fee clearly alongside the ticket price.
The £20 ticket appears with a clear note about the £5 per-order fee from the first moment a price is shown. Ticket prices stay consistent with your brochure and season materials, and the fee is explained rather than buried. The trade-off is that visitors have to add it up themselves, so it works best when the note is prominent and sits right next to the price.
Your legal adviser can confirm which approach fits the markets you sell in. Taking these two options to that conversation, along with how your fees are set up, will get you a clearer answer, faster.
Applying either approach by hand would be a big job. A typical venue website shows hundreds of prices across events, price bands and “from” prices, many of them pulled straight from your ticketing system. Updating each one manually takes time, and it’s easy to miss some. In CultureSuite, you set it up once and the platform applies it across your website.
How CultureSuite helps you show fees clearly
Whichever approach you take, CultureSuite CMS supports it, without editing every listing by hand.
Fees included in every price you display.
Set your per-order fee once in the Control Panel and it's added to every ticket price displayed on your website, so each one shows the all-in figure a visitor will pay for a single ticket.
A clear explanation, right next to the price.
The Cost explainer field adds a short note to each production. Use it to explain a fee that's already included, for example "£25 (this includes a booking fee of £5 per order)", or to show the fee clearly alongside the ticket price.
Inside the purchase path, your ticketing system can still break the order down line by line, with the full total shown before payment.
Either way, visitors see the fee from the first price on your website, not as a surprise at checkout.
Why this belongs in your digital strategy
Pricing rules sit alongside accessibility standards and cookie consent as regulations that land directly on a venue's website. Each is easier to manage when the response is built into the platform your whole programme runs on, rather than worked out one listing or one project at a time.
It’s also a chance to put visitors first. A clear price belongs with fast pages and accessible design as part of a booking experience that respects your audience’s time and trust.
At CultureSuite, we follow regulatory change across the markets our Community works in, build the response into the platform, and share practical guidance so every venue can make informed decisions. When the rules move again, as they will in Australia from July 2027 and in the EU once the Digital Fairness Act is agreed, platform updates reach every venue at once.
Five things worth doing now
Take advice for each market you sell in.
The rules differ in detail from one country to the next, and in the US from one state to the next, with some states going further than the federal rule. Your legal adviser is the right person to tell you how they apply to your venue.
Check everywhere a price appears.
Your website is only one place. Emails, brochures, social posts and listings you supply to other sites all show prices too, so make sure they follow the same approach.
Check your "from" prices and concessions.
The lowest price band and discounted tickets are easy to miss, so make sure they're handled the same way as your other prices.
Talk to your ticketing provider.
Confirm how your fees are configured and how they'll appear in the order summary, so the website and purchase path tell the same story.
Agree your explainer wording.
A short, consistent line about the booking fee helps visitors trust the price, and should mean fewer questions for your box office team.
Set the stage for clearer pricing
Whether you're updating your prices this week or still getting your head around the rules, here's where to go next.
- Already part of the CultureSuite Community?
Everything you need to switch on transparent pricing is in our knowledge base, including example wording. Learn more about transparent pricing in CultureSuite CMS. - See how CultureSuite CMS makes pricing transparent
Book a personalised demo and we'll show you transparent pricing on a live venue website, then talk through what it would look like on yours. - Keep exploring
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