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A woman wants to start a class action lawsuit on behalf of all sports fans who have had to pay “junk fees” when buying tickets to events. Jaymie Gustafson of Washington, D.C. is suing the Nationals baseball team in federal district court after being charged more than the quoted and advertised prices for tickets.
Sportico reports that Gustafson filed the lawsuit against the Washington Nationals after noticing that when she looked at her credit card statement she had been “charged a higher amount” than what had been advertised.
She claims that the higher fee she ended up paying for Nationals tickets was done using two types of junk fees practices: drip pricing and partitioned pricing. Drip pricing is the practice of a business adding a fee to the overall cost “after consumers have already expended time and effort.” Partitioned pricing is when a fee is not included in the advertised or quoted “total price” of a product, such as a shipping and handling fee.
Her complaint asks for her lawsuit to be certified as a class action on behalf of anyone who bought Nationals tickets from the team, through the MLB Ballpark app, or through MLB.com, prior to July 16, 2024, and had to pay “a service fee, handling and convenience fee, ticket processing fee, order processing fee, and/or other similar fee.”
The Consumer Protection Procedures Act
Gustafson is suing under the Nationals for violating the Consumer Protection Procedures Act of Washington D.C., which guarantees consumers “truthful information from merchants” with regard to pricing. While the Nationals stopped using junk fees in July 2024, her complaint is seeking “the millions of dollars in junk fees” that fans have not been refunded.
According to a 2024 article by the National Consumer Law Center, “‘Junk fees’ are hidden charges attached to goods and services such as loans, bank accounts, or purchases. These unexpected fees obscure the true price, make a profit off of ‘gotchas,’ and prevent comparison shopping. Consumers pay tens and maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars a year in junk fees on bank accounts, credit cards, rental agreements, and other goods and services.”
A 2023 study cited in Gustafson’s complaint noted that the live event industry earned around $7.14 billion in revenue from junk fees in 2023. The Federal Trade Commission said in 2024 that consumers spend an estimated 53 million hours each year searching for junk fee information to determine the actual total price of live-event tickets and short-term lodging due to them often being hidden by businesses.