A Virginia man is suing the company behind SeaWorld Orlando and Busch Gardens for adding "illegal" hidden fees onto its ticket prices.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Florida last week, lawyers for Matthew Beeman accused United Parks and Resorts of breaking Virginia's transparent pricing law with "bait and switch" tactics that trick customers into paying more.
"Defendant conceals its mandatory fees until after consumers have invested substantial time selecting tickets and have committed to purchasing based on the incomplete, deceptively low advertised price," the lawsuit reads.
"Each stage of Defendant’s multi-step checkout process is designed to increase consumer commitment so that, by the time the hidden fees are revealed, consumers — having already expended time and effort — are more likely to complete the transaction."
As a result, it alleged, the Florida-based company has "knowingly employed an illegal hidden fees strategy in blatant violation of Virginia law".
United Parks and Resorts did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent and has not yet answered the lawsuit in court.
The lawsuit stems from just under $40 in service fees apparently added to four tickets bought by Beeman in July this year for Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Water Country USA, via three separate transactions on the parks' websites.
After selecting his tickets, Beeman said he was then required to click through a long series of selection and optional add-on screens before being shown the hidden fees, at which point the website was already counting down the minutes before his booking would be lost.
The fees began at $11.99 per purchase for one ticket and increased depending on the number of tickets ordered.
Though the website had showed Beeman an added amount for "taxes and fees" at an earlier stage, the final itemized total revealed that none of this amount was actually taxes, and all of it was fees.
That, Beeman's lawsuit alleges, was a clear violation of Virginia's up-front pricing law, which bans companies from advertising or displaying a price without "clearly and conspicuously including" any fees or surcharges.
It may also be also an example of what experts call a "dark pattern": a general term for manipulative online design tactics that shape users' behavior in ways that benefit the system designer.
Among them is "drip pricing", which the Federal Trade Commission describes as "a pricing technique in which firms advertise only part of a product's price, and reveal other changes later as the consumer goes through the buying process."
SeaWorld Orlando also tacks on the same $11.99-or-more fees, as The Independent found when we went through the ticket buying process from California.
Beeman's lawsuit asks the judge to grant class action status, representing anyone in Virginia who recently bought a ticket to Busch Gardens Williamsburg or Water Country USA from United Parks and Resorts without being shown the full price up front.
United faced a similar action last year when a woman in Osceola County, Florida, sued it over a 5 percent fee added to items that she bought while visiting SeaWorld Orlando. The company said it had disclosed the fee before the purchases.
Other states have also passed transparent pricing laws, sometimes leading to legal action. The FTC and a bipartisan group of state attorneys general sued Ticketmaster last month accusing it of deceiving both artists and consumers by advertising fake low prices, as well as conniving with scalpers to sell tickets to users at substantial markups.
In April, a Maryland woman also sued Ticketmaster under her own state's pricing law, accusing it of "deceptive and manipulative" tactics including "drip pricing". Ticketmaster said her claims were inaccurate, and is fighting the lawsuit.
StubHub, too, has been sued by the city of Washington D.C. for drip pricing and other "deceptive practices", which have allegedly cost residents $11m in hidden fees since 2015.
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