Sinemia announced Monday that it will offer a new “unlimited” ticket option for $29.99 per month.
The plan allows subscribers to score a ticket to one 2D movie ticket per day in Australia, the US, Canada and the UK.
The service allows you to buy tickets for movies in advance, which means you can also select your seats (a must for me these days).
Note: From comments, ~$2 convenience/booking fee can apply per ticket.
I'm in the same boat, sent their support an email about being charged the booking fee and when I can get the card about a week ago and still haven't heard back…
Since when did they start charging booking fees?
I'm two months into my membership. Never receive the card so I gave in and paid the $10 fee to use the cashless.
Not sure why you got charge for booking fees. So far, my partner and I have used our membership twice at Hoyts, once at iMax, once at Sun Theatre. They all charge booking fees but the credit card Sinemia provided cover the booking fees.
New Sinemia app version 3.3 introduced the fee.
Just don't update the app and stay on version 3.2.17
is this like a movie pass competitor?
Good comment - beware of these long-term deals, look what happened to the T&C of MoviePass in the US:
https://www.cnet.com/news/moviepass-confusion-isnt-new-here-…
I thought they were dead? They refunded everyone's unlimited yearly plans and moved them to month by month.
Beware this company, many people don't manage to redeem their movies (myself included). Some report being successful however.
Their customer support took over 2 months to respond to my issues too (with a copy/paste response)
Good deal if it works for you, but be ready to lose your money, and don't sign up for a full year contract.
So far, I only have success with their support via Twitter DM.
You can only pre-paid in full for one year. There is no option to pay by the month.
OK, well I signed up about half a year ago, and that's when I paid by the month. I would definitely not recommend signing up at all if there's no monthly option anymore.
It should be noted that this does not actually work for a majority of Australian cinema chains. The digital card is a US debit card, so cannot be used to purchase tickets for Village, Hoyts and most Event cinemas. The supposed work around is to create a US Paypal account, using a vpn and US contact/address details and then add each temporary card to this every time you need to make a purchase, followed by then selecting Paypal when purchasing, however even this only works 1 out of every 10 attempts.
Sinemia customer support is also non-existant. So you pre-purchase a service you cannot actually use, and have no means of getting a response from the company.
Highly recommend this be avoided.
I’ve never had it not work with the PayPal card trick… Event cinemas too.
I actually just booked directly using the prepaid US card on event and it went through for a movie tomorrow night.
Can admit i haven't been able to get it working for months, but it just worked for me.
SINEMIA IS A SCAM. PLEASE DO NOT POST IT IN OZBARGAIN.
Two months can’t get any tickets. Cashless payment denied every time. I’ll be reporting this law enforcement.
Search Google Sinemia review to see yourself.
Watched 6 movies in 3 months. Never had an issue using PayPal at Event cinemas.
I actually just booked directly using the prepaid US card on event and it went through for a movie tomorrow night.
Can admit i haven't been able to get it working for months, but it just worked for me.
Have you tried the Australian Paypal method? Works for me.
The only problem I had is Hoyts website won't let me use Paypal to pay for two separate tickets. It kept throwing up transaction error when I try to pay for the second ticket. Also does not work for "Special Event" session when I tried to book Advance Screening for Crazy Rich Asians.
The Paypal workaround posted Savitar? That’s not what advertised and service I paid for. I want my money back.
You can also ask them for a refund over Twitter
Been using it for four months making payments to Village using the PayPal work around. Works great.
Pay Pal work around people remember to remove cc card details after you made your ticket booking! If not removed it will be linked to your Pay Pal account and nobody else will be able to book via the work around…
Sinemia recycles / re-uses their virtual CC numbers…
I've been using the US paypal workaround successfully for the past 3 months for Hoyts, love it. However, the price has increased significantly since then and it looks like they are even charging you for cardless.
If you sign up now you're likely going to have to pay the booking fee of $0.99 per ticket, which means if you take them up on the offer of 1 movie/day you'd be up for an additional $28 - $31 per month on top of the subscription cost.
Not that this in and of itself makes the deal crap, it's just a "gotcha" that n00bs and nitpickers need to be aware of.
This outfit has form for imposing undisclosed fees after you have already paid for the service. It's great value when it works, but be on your guard and don't hesitate to demand a refund. They ultimately waived the $10 cardless activation fee for me after arguing with them over Twitter.
did they waive it by giving you a refund, or did you have to wait for them to waive it first?
They waived it by activating it at their end, I didn't pay the fee.
Significant increase in costs for the non-unlimited plans - be wary that this outfit changes their pricing almost weekly and their pricing has been significantly cheaper than this in the past (see previous deals).
Is there any alternate service to sinemia in Australia ? Better
I am eager to know this too. If this service worked well I'd be signed up again in a heartbeat.
I'm curious to who has been voting down all the comments that say something bad about Sinemia.
It kind of seems like someone from the company is trying to discredit all their nay sayers instead of actually working to improve their customer service.
It works. But the "booking fees" that have been introduced lately are rubbish.
It is funny coz they charged AUD$2 each for two tickets
And the actual booking fees on the tickets was much less.($1.2 each)
funny
No, it's a scam.
TThey are charging a flat $2 rate, people have legit problems with sinemia but when the massive chains with economies of scale can charge close to $20 and "small" cinemas can charge half that, clearly sinemia is not the worst actor in the market. BCC/Event, AMC, that's where the scan is. And their customer service is so shit, ever waited in line a Event cinemas Indooroooilly, with one senior citizen serving the counter with a line around the corner?
They are a radically worse actor. I am not saying that Sinemia is not the cheapest option; in theory clearly it is. But you cannot actually trust them to honour the deal after you have paid for a subscription, which has to factor in to the comparison. What if tomorrow the per-ticket fee increases to $4, or $6, or $8? There was no basis for the additional $2 fee, so there is nothing stopping them from charging even more. Clearly they can continue to extort paying customers.
At least BCC/Event/Village etc are honest and upfront about how much they are going to charge you in total. Sinemia is not charging $2/ticket, they are bait and switching you after selling you on $3-$7 a ticket and then forcing a significant (percentage-wise) increase on you, with no basis, during the term of a prepaid subscription. If they were an Australian company this simply wouldn't fly, they would be forced to honour their contract. Because they are Turkish, your only real recourse is through chargebacks.
https://www.slashfilm.com/sinemia-is-helping-movie-theaters-…
Still too scared to subscribe but their business model seems a lot more robust than MoviePass
Robust for them - if they continue this pattern of not honouring subscriptions there's certainly no reason to think they will go under.
They now charge for additional costs like booking fees etc, be aware. I have been using it for several months and it's great when it works but it can be incredibly volatile and I'm still waiting for a physical card, it really doesn't seem like I'll get a card anytime soon and will have to keep using cardless.