What does Will Call Mean?
If you're looking to go see your favourite band live, it's not a simple as you would expect. With pre-sale, advance tickets, weird service fees, will calls, cobos etc it can become quite the daunting task. We wrote an article a while back on how to secure your concert tickets and secure the tickets ahead of time. Today, we'll cover some of the terms related to buying concert tickets.
Best Ways to Buy Concert Tickets
There are generally three ways to buy concert tickets:
A) Wait in line at the box office
B) Call and order over the phone and
C) buy them online.
Unless you want to hang out with stinky fans who wait in line for hours or even days to secure their tickets, we strongly discourage you from buying them at the box office whenthey go on sale. Using the phone is usually too slow and the lines are packed so that doesn't always work. Buying online (see our tips on buying tickets online) is one the best ways to get your tickets.
Service and Convenience Fees on Concert Tickets
We can go on and on about service fees and how much we hate them but there's really no avoiding them. Service fees (also known as convenience fees in some areas) is a fee charged by Ticketmaster, Admission or whichever ticket broker the concert you are attending is using. Usually the price is anywhere between $8 to $15 but we have seen cases where we've had to pay as much as $30 in "convenience" fees.
Getting your tickets
When you buy your tickets online, there are very few venues that accept printed tickets. Some do, and some even offer tickets for your mobile device. If they do, great use one of those options as they're the most convenient. Your other two options are receiving the tickets by regular mail, also easy but usually has an extra fee associated to the transaction. Lastly, there's will call.
What is Will Call?
According to Wikipedia, will call is short for "Will call for", which is another way of saying "will come and get". It's when you need to actually go to the venue and pick up the ticket. In certain cases, even using will call has a fee associated to it. Also, expect to wait in a huge line before actually getting your ticket so arrive at the venue ahead of time. Will call ticket pickup usually has it own lines at the Box Office of the venue. Make sure you bring ID and the exact same credit card that was used to purchase the tickets with you.
What's COBO?
COBO is the United Kingdom version of will call. It's the exact same thing as will call. It stands for Care Of Box Office. Other variations include "Collections", "At the door" or the more straightforward "Tickets can be collected at the door".