Class Action Lawsuit Claims Washington Nationals Add Undisclosed Junk Fees to Baseball Ticket Purchases

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A proposed class action lawsuit claims that the Washington Nationals has failed to disclose to consumers the full price of game tickets up front and instead tacked on various junk fees at the end of the purchasing process.

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The 23-page lawsuit says that the National East team, until roughly July 2024, failed to accurately represent the prices of its tickets to online and in-person purchasers, deceiving customers into paying more than was advertised by adding junk fees—listed as service charges, handling and convenience charges, ticket processing charges and order processing charges—at the last stage of the purchasing process.

The suit accuses the Nationals of “systemically cheating customers out of millions of dollars” by falsely advertising ticket prices. Though the team reportedly stopped charging undisclosed junk fees last year, it has not refunded fans the millions they have been wrongfully charged, the case says.

Junk fees, the filing explains, are a form of drip pricing whereby a seller does not disclose the full price of an item until the consumer is already committed to or otherwise involved in the purchase. Junk fees are also a variety of partition pricing, where a portion of a good or service’s cost is excluded from the advertised total price, the case says.

The complaint claims that Nationals ticket prices regularly increased by almost 60 percent once the junk fees were added at the end of the purchasing process.

Related Reading: Washington Nationals Ticket Fees Lawsuit Investigation

The lawsuit argues that hidden junk fees are deceptive and unfair, given that they trick consumers into thinking a ticket costs less than it actually does, while also stopping a potential buyer from effectively comparing prices to find the best deal.

Additionally, per the complaint, consumers are unlikely to abandon a purchase once they reach the point in the process at which the junk fees are revealed. This is because consumers generally do not want to expend the additional effort of searching for a better price when they have already invested time and effort into their present option, the case contends.

Even if the fees at issue are disclosed earlier, the complaint writes, they are still partitioned and listed separately from a ticket’s base price. The filing argues that the disclosure of partitioned fees is still insufficient, as research has shown that consumers will place more importance on the base price of a product and are unlikely to calculate the actual total cost. This is especially true, the complaint says, if the junk fees are disclosed in smaller, fainter text than the base price, as is often the case.

The filing also alleges that both in-person and online buyers were further pressured into accepting the Washington Nationals’ junk fees due to time limits placed on their purchases. For in-person purchases, consumers typically seek to not hold up the line at the box office, while for online purchases, the website or app would place a time limit on every transaction before that ticket or set of tickets were put back into the pool of available seats for others to potentially buy.

The Washington Nationals class action lawsuit seeks to represent all individuals in the United States who, prior to July 16, 2024, purchased a Washington Nationals ticket at the Nationals Park Box Office, through the MLB Ballpark app or via MLB.com and was subsequently charged a service fee, ticket processing fee, handling and convenience fee, order processing fee and/or other similar fee.

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