Following a wave of regulations banning the surprise fees that appear at the end of a transaction, Ticketmaster stopped charging the extra few dollars it added to each order at checkout. Typically shared with the venue, the order processing fee was a boon to a global platform that sells hundreds of millions of tickets a year.

But documents obtained by the Guardian show that while Ticketmaster eliminated this fee to comply with the rules, the company simply raised the cost of different fees in a number of its venues to ensure it didn’t lose money.

“To account for the loss of order processing revenue, we must adjust fees to offset the revenue loss,” Ticketmaster wrote in an email to the Findlay Toyota Center in Arizona last year. The venue eliminated a $6 order processing fee, but raised the service fee on each ticket by $2 instead.

The email was included as part of Ticketmaster’s contract with the venue and obtained through a public records request. The Guardian obtained the agreements for 26 publicly owned venues around the country, ranging from town theatres to stadiums such as the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and the Alamodome in San Antonio.

Nearly all the contracts describe an order processing fee like the one in the Findlay Toyota Center that is no longer permitted. At least eight venues amended their contracts to raise other fees following the all-in pricing rules, contracts and emails show.

Quelle surprise.