EIF 2024: Caveat Emptor!
Hugh Kerr, Editor of the Edinburgh Music Review:
The Edinburgh Festival, which traditionally has been a low cost open access festival with big discounts for pensioners, has now become a high cost Festival more like Salzburg than Edinburgh! Top ticket prices for opera are £149 and lowest prices at £39 are twice what the Upper Slips at Covent Garden cost. Nicola Benedetti may want to get the community more involved with the Festival but she is in danger of pricing many traditional festival goers out!
Kate Calder:
Two weeks ago, I reported on the launch of the Edinburgh International Festival 2024, and wrote about ticket prices. As I suggested then, flexible pricing has again come into force, a policy which Nicola Benedetti defended in an interview with Brian Ferguson in the Scotsman. My £60 membership fee entitled me to buy tickets from 19th March. Like many others, I took advantage of the multi-buy offers for opera tickets, Queen’s Hall tickets and for the Philharmonia Orchestra Residency, thus reducing certain prices by 20%.
However something which I missed, and has been flagged up to me by several people is that the information in the printed programme about multi-buy tickets is misleading. Tickets in the top price categories are excluded from these offers, and this information appears only on the website. You’ll find a summary of the conditions on the Affordability web page, but the precise details about which ticket codes constitute the top-price tickets are available only under the heading ‘Booking Info’ on the page for each individual show. So while the second price Usher Hall ticket for ‘Capriccio’ at £89 is not eligible for a multi-buy discount, an £84 ticket is.
In her Scotsman interview, Nicola Benedetti said “There are many people who can afford expensive, premium tickets”. Indeed there are, but with many Festival tickets becoming a luxury item, some people are treating themselves to fewer but more expensive tickets. After the publicity about multi-buy offers - “the best discounted deals the Festival has ever had” - it seems petty to exclude the higher-priced tickets, and strange, to say the least, to fail to provide this information provide this information in the printed programme.
So let the buyer beware and check the small print before buying tickets. If any of your discounts aren’t applied, email the box office, and if you don’t get a multi-buy ticket discount because one or more of your tickets is a “premium” one, phone the box-office to ask to change the ticket(s) for the next price down. The staff are very helpful, and are already aware of the pitfalls!
