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HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
The number of tickets sold and the ticket cost are inversely proportional to each other. That is to say, the more tickets are sold, the lower the cost of the tickets. It is because the salaries paid to the ticketing staff remain unchanged no matter how many tickets are sold, be it 1 ticket or 1,000 tickets. The only difference is that more paper is required for printing the tickets.
At present, some cultural and recreation events are very popular while some are not. As Members all know, the events organized by commercial hirers are more popular. In fact, when a certain kind of service is popular, as a service provider, the Urban Council should give them a hand. As regards cost recovery, of course I am in favour of recovering the cost at a reasonable level. However, if we arbitrarily add the number of tickets sold for the popular events together with those for the unpopular events in order to lower the average ticket cost for the latter, then the commercial organisers of the popular events may request to itemise the different charges on the tickets, such as ticket price and tariff, etc. like what is done on the film tickets. Then, the ticket price and the URBTIX service charge would appear on the tickets, which would lead to dissatisfaction of the public. Therefore, while I very much agree that a review should be conducted, I don't think it is appropriate to print the URBTIX service charge on the tickets for cost recovery purpose.
With these remarks, I support the motion.
CHAIRMAN (in Cantonese): Miss Ada WONG Ying-kay has registered to speak.
MISS ADA WONG YING-KAY (in Cantonese): Mr. Chairman, I am glad that the question I raised at the last monthly meeting had aroused Members' concern and I am very much in support of Mr. CHAN Choi-hi's motion today. I can see that today's motion includes two parts: one is on cost recovery while the other is on the improvements on operational efficiency. As regards cost recovery, I fully agree that we should consider recovering full ticket cost from the commercial hirers. I observed that more than 50% of the annual ticket volume sold through the URBTIX are for events held in the Hong Kong Coliseum or large-scale events. The Department has said to me that the concert organisers may have great reactions if we charge them full cost because they are forced to use the URBTIX system. At present, we charge $3 per ticket. As I observed, the highest ticket price for concerts is $380. Suppose the ticket cost is $6 per ticket, we will only be charging $3 more. I don't see how this would affect the ticket price greatly. Moreover, I think it would not be difficult to differentiate commercial events from non-commercial events. According to our policy on venue hiring, we offer concessionary rates to non-profit-making or charitable hirers but no such offer is given to other kinds of events, such as the Phantom of the Opera which was staged at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre for more than 4 months, and we charged them a percentage of their gate receipts. So I believe the Department can draw up some guidelines to
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