The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act includes a two-week cooling-off period for memberships and subscriptions to prevent people being trapped in unsuitable long-term contracts. Museums offer annual memberships that include free tickets to paid exhibitions, and members can claim refunds on membership fees within the two-week window after using those free tickets. That sequence could allow people to visit paid exhibitions effectively for free. A group of museums and charities has asked the government to distinguish charitable memberships from commercial subscriptions to prevent abuse. The scale of exploitation is uncertain, and some argue claims of systemic threat are exaggerated.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which came into effect last year, includes an option to add what initially seems like a sensible clause - a two-week cooling-off period for consumers who buy memberships or subscriptions to a service. The aim of clauses 264-266 of the Act is to avoid people being caught in long-term contracts for services that don't match what they were sold.
In essence, someone paying for an annual membership will often be offered free tickets to the museum's paid exhibitions, which they could use and then claim a refund on their annual membership fee within the two-week window. They'd then have visited the paid exhibition for free. Considering how important paid exhibitions are to museum finances, that looks like a problem.
To prevent it happening, a group of museums and charities have written to the government asking for it to consider a change that would differentiate between charitable memberships and subscriptions for commercial services such as gyms and software services. Their joint letter, reported in The Times said that the current set-up "threatens to cripple the very future value of membership itself as a functional model of income generation for charities with visitor models" That might be overegging it somewhat.
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