Payment chips: Consumer advice center warns festival organizers and files suit
Many festivals are cashless: visitors can only pay with a chip they have to top up. This generates additional costs, and remaining credit is often retained.
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Summer is festival time. Concert events such as Rock am Ring, Nature One, Fusion Festival, Parookaville and Wacken Open Air attract fans of open-air music experiences. Increasingly, visitors need payment chips on their wrists to buy food and drinks on the festival site. Consumer advocates see a problem beyond the displacement of cash: According to them, several organizers charge unlawful fees for the use of the chips.
Activation costs up to 2 euros
According to the German Federation of Consumer Organizations (vzbv), the difficulties begin with the initial charging of the payment solution. The consumer advocates recently examined the practice and found that several operators charged between 29 cents and 2 euros for activating the chips or topping them up for the first time. In the view of the inspectors, such additional costs are inadmissible if consumers top up the digital memory with a debit or credit card and the chip is the only payment option on site. This corresponds to an additional charge for the use of these payment cards, which is not permitted by law.
The vzbv also complains that the handling of potential remaining credit is not in order: Several operators either demanded a fee for the refund or did not pay out the money at all if there was no minimum amount left. The latter would have amounted to between one and 2.50 euros during the investigation.
Unclear ticket prices add to this
However, the organizers are legally obliged to pay out the entire remaining amount, the association argues. Consumers could, in principle, insist on a corresponding refund. Some organizers also set deadlines of just a few weeks in which a refund must be requested. Considering the regular limitation period of three years, this is clearly too short.
The consumer advice center's inspection also revealed that some organizers did not display the ticket price correctly. For example, additional service fees were not included in the advertised offers. They were only added to the prices when the ticket purchase was completed, which obscured the actual costs. It also made it difficult to compare prices with other festivals.
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First successes in court
Considering the identified shortcomings, the consumer advocates have already issued warnings to ten festival organizers since May. Eight of them have since vowed to do better and issued a cease-and-desist declaration. Heroes Festival is not one of them. The vzbv has therefore filed a lawsuit against it with the Bamberg Higher Regional Court (Ref.: 3 UKl 9/25 e). It accuses the organizer of adding 1.50 euros for a one-off chip top-up and withholding 50 cents from the remaining credit.
The warning campaign is part of ongoing legal proceedings in which the consumer association is seeking a court ruling on the illegality of additional costs for payment chips. In line with this, the Berlin Regional Court (52 U 98/24) ordered the organizer of the Lollapalooza festival in the capital to cease and desist at the beginning of 2025 (case no.: 52 U 98/24). However, the decision is not yet legally binding. This also applies to a ruling by the Bochum Regional Court, which deemed an activation fee and minimum payout amounts at the Juicy Beats Festival to be inadmissible (case reference: I-17 O 2/25).
(vbr)
