"online" at what cost?

I had a bad taste of someone forcefully pushing the "go online" mantra on me last week.

We decided to go for Sakuni last week with a friend's family and decided to check ticket availability online at a movie hall near our house called qcinemas.
qcinemas had promptly outsourced on-line booking to bookmyshow.com and when I checked the ticket price, they were charging a whopping 11% service tax for on-line booking.

Being closer to the movie hall, I decided to just drive there to book the tickets directly. While waiting in the queue, I checked bookmyshow to confirm that the seats I wanted are indeed available.
To my utter horror, the system there did not show those seats as available and when asked, the guy at the counter coolly replied that those are allocated for on-line booking and told me to book online if I really wanted those seats.

Since I had travelled all the way, I just bought the available seats from the counter.

While I'm a big fan of online purchases/bookings, I view them mostly from a convenience and price point. Stores like flipkart provide a fabulous service from both a service and price point and has been a long time favourite of mine.

This experience raised couple of questions:

  1. Isn't there any regulation around how much a service provider can charge as a convenience fee? 11% is ridiculously high for a online transaction.
  2. What's prompting the movie hall to just out-source the best seats to an online payment system?
  3. Why do they have such dumb systems which cannot override a allocated quota upon the request of a movie goer? At the end of the day, it is the customer who needs to be happy right?

The most ironic thing in all of this is that, when we actually went to watch the movie (the next day), those very seats that were available online, were still lying empty...

So much so for thrusting online booking on a end-user.

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