To Free or Not to Free
I have a small bugbear. It really gets my goat when people describe autographs or photo shoots that are included in the ticket price of a convention/event as “free”. I especially hate it when it’s the con organisers or people involved in the running of the con that do it.
If they’re are listed on the website as being included in the price THEN THEY ARE NOT FREE.
They are not extras. They are not specials. They cannot and should not be held over attendees as a special thing if they complain about something in the running of the con (as in “yeah, but you got all this other stuff for free, what are you complaining about!”).
Including these things in the ticket price is offering great value for money and that’s a good thing. It’s thing to market the con on. It’s something to sing about when you’re selling the tickets and something to be praised as great value when the event is done. I’m not knocking that, not in the slightest.
However it also means they’ve entered into a basic level of service agreement with their attendees to provide those items. If a con organiser is thinking of these things as “free” then I worry that they wont be treating them as the essential items of fulfilling the contract that they are. That has the potential to lead to poor customer service either during or when listening to feedback after the con.
Describing them as “free” is also bad when it’s done by attendees because it makes people too laid back about getting the items that they are contractually allowed to have. Not getting them when they’re a freebie is hugely different to not getting something you’ve actually paid for already. It also means that people will put up with bad customer service or comments from organisers because how can they argue that they were treated badly if the items were free!
If organisers go above and beyond the level of service they’ve listed on their site as included, then it’s also easier to praise them if not everything is described as free. To properly admire what you might get free, you first need to understand exactly which bits you’ve paid for and have those bits delivered on.
