Six flags is now charging you to print tickets at home.

Carrie M. said:
Come on, man. It's not a matter of whether or not people visit the park by themselves, it's a matter of whether or not they purchase their ticket individually. There's a difference.

While I grant you there are many families that attend the park, I want to say the number of people who purchase their ticket on their own and then meet up to attend the park together is probably larger than you give credit for here and definitely larger than just the enthusiast group.

I can honestly say I've never done that in my life. In my circle of family and friends, someone just usually buys the tickets and gets paid back or someone picks up something else along the way, like a hotel room or dinner or something and we call it even.

I suppose I see your situation, but it doesn't make sense to me to do it that way.

I stand by what I said before in that the issue is less about the fee and its disclosure, and more about the incentivized discounting in order to use the service that then requires the fee. That's just silly.

Difference of opinion/approach again. I'm trying to reason why it's silly but it hurts my head. It makes perfect sense to me. Want to save money on tickets? Then use our online system.

It's not so silly that it will change behavior, though, in my opinion.

Agreed. And if you believe the Screamscape thing I mentioned on the previous page, then complaints have been pretty much non-existent.

Tend to agree with Carrie in this regard: If I sell you a car, and offer you a 10% discount on the 20K pricetag (under the condition that includes a requirement that you use my car-loan company which charges a 5% surcharge, origination fee, whatever), then you're really getting a 5% discount, because the other 5% isn't available - the discount only applies to cars purchased through...GMAC (for example).

How savvy are consumers in this regard? Not touching that aspect! ;)

Lord Gonchar said:
I can honestly say I've never done that in my life.

Then it must not be possible!

I don't care one way or another, but someone has to stick it to the pimp now and then.

I never said that though, Jeff.

I meant it to explain why the thought didn't really occur to me and concurred that the situation probably happens a bit even if it doesn't make sense to me...and it doesn't.

Fool! I'm impervious to your selective quoting powers! :)

It could be worse. They could give you no discount online and still charge the $5 fee.

Don't give them any idea's, Swim.

Almost every time I've visited a park with friends, I've bought my own ticket. We all go "stag". That's what people do when they don't have enough money to just buy a whole bunch of tickets and then expect to get paid back whenever is convenient.

I wish I had a real-world example, LK, but back in the days when the difference between one ticket and 5 would have mattered to me, this method of purchase wasn't available.

We had to stand in line to buy a ticket way back in the mid-90's. :)

True.

I have bought a few tickets for my entire group online before, I must admit. I don't remember a charge, but I can't even remember the year or the park.

Here's another one I just found in addition to the examples from Screamscape:

Hershey offers no discount for online purchase ($51.95) and charges a convenience fee of $1.25 per ticket.

Lord Gonchar said:
We had to stand in line to buy a ticket way back in the mid-90's. :)

At least there is now an alternative to doing that. I remember going to Great Adventure and waiting 45 minutes just to buy a ticket to get into the park!

^ I remember those days. I was always up early because I knew the lines would be long. My family would loligag and take forever getting up to the gate where the line was already long, and I could see people already on the coasters. It was so frustrating! lol

I got frustrated because I could never understood what took people so long. It's not like they had to decide what color to paint their house. I saw the process as: tell the employee what you want to buy, have the employee give you the total price, pay the employee, and get change/receipt and tickets. Why that was made to be so complicated was always beyond me.

Lord Gonchar said:
Here's another one I just found in addition to the examples from Screamscape:

Hershey offers no discount for online purchase ($51.95) and charges a convenience fee of $1.25 per ticket.

Are they pushing multi-day and multi-ticket packages?

Not sure I'd call it pushing on the website, but they make you well aware of the the options.

I saw on their FAQs that they still offer the discount tickets at Giant Foods and Martin's stores. But I couldn't find any mention of it on Giant's website, so I have no idea how much the discount will be this year. My guess would be around $39.95 so they're under $40 (barely).

Rob Ascough said:
I got frustrated because I could never understood what took people so long. It's not like they had to decide what color to paint their house. I saw the process as: tell the employee what you want to buy, have the employee give you the total price, pay the employee, and get change/receipt and tickets. Why that was made to be so complicated was always beyond me.

Rob, I think most of the time people were just aghast at the price. Not many people pay attention until they get to the ticketing kiosk. I would see it all the time. Parents would get to the window and get enraged when the attendant tells them the price to enter. Then they'd argue and yell with the family members for a couple minutes, then end up paying anyway.

As someone who spent a few crazy busy Halloweekends Saturdays selling tickets at CP (the days the ticket lines were 45-60 minutes long), that's pretty much exactly what happens. Or at least, it's the #1 issue. Other issues were people arguing about coupons/wanting better deals on their coupons and people not having their money/credit card ready. Also, groups that tried to get all their money together and figure out the split right at the window usually took as long or longer than the groups who bought all their tickets individually.

That's great. The long lines were the result of peoples' inability to perform simple math estimations in their heads? ;)

Other issues were...

So, what you're saying is guests don't check their brains at the turnstiles. They leave them in their cars!

Have you seen people driving to and then parking once they reach the park?

Most never even make it to the car.