One of the key selling points for ticketing app Dice has always been its promise not to charge booking fees for its mobile tickets. Now the company has changed its policy, and has been explaining the decision to customers after a Twitter spat with British band Shame made it public.
“Everyone’s favourite ‘no booking fees’ vendor @dicefm have slyly added a 10% booking fee to shows costing above £10, we knew absolutely nothing about this,” tweeted the band on 9 February.
A few days later, Dice MD Russ Tannen published a response on Medium for customers.
“As we grew (thanks to you guys) we discovered that to get a significant allocation of tickets for bigger shows, we had to agree to include a ‘booking fee’. This was particularly the case for our expansion in North America,” he wrote.
“Ultimately, it was a case of either drop ‘Best Gigs’ or drop ‘No Booking Fees’. So we decided to start incorporating some fees to a small number of shows and dropped the ‘no booking fees’ line in January 2017. What didn’t change is our commitment to always try and be the lowest price.”
The risk for Dice is that the delay in explaining the change will erode trust from its community. The flipside, though, is that the fees may boost (or indeed, be crucial to) Dice’s efforts to build a sustainable business.
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