Refunds, and setting a policy people can read

Almost every refund argument is really an argument about what was agreed. The fix, therefore, is not a better refund process — it is agreeing the terms visibly, in advance, at the moment the person is deciding to pay.

Set the policy on the event

Each event carries a refund policy, shown to buyers before they pay. Whatever you choose, it is stated where the decision is being made rather than buried in terms nobody opened.

This is worth doing carefully even though it is tempting to leave on a default. A policy the buyer saw is a policy you can point at without embarrassment. A policy in a linked document is, in practice, not a policy at all — and in the EU, terms a consumer was never meaningfully shown are on weak ground regardless of what they say.

Be specific about the cases that actually come up: illness, a named ticket holder who cannot attend, a postponement, and a cancellation by you. The last one is not optional — if you cancel, attendees are owed their money, and saying so up front costs you nothing and buys a great deal of goodwill.

Let attendees cancel themselves — within limits

You can allow attendees to cancel their own booking, and set a cutoff in hours before the event after which they no longer can.

Self-service cancellation removes an entire category of email from your life, and it costs you nothing you were going to keep anyway. Somebody who cannot attend will not attend whether or not you process their request; the only variable is whether you spend twenty minutes on it and whether the ticket goes back on sale in time to be resold.

The cutoff is what stops it happening while doors are opening. A sensible default is somewhere between 24 and 72 hours — long enough that a returned ticket can realistically find a new buyer through your waitlist, short enough to feel fair.

What a refund does to the money

The mechanics, stated plainly, because this is where platforms are usually vague.

• The payment is reversed to the buyer from your connected Stripe balance. You are the merchant, so the money comes back from where it went.
• Ticket inventory returns to sale, which is what feeds the waitlist.
• Stripe's processing fee is not returned to you. That is Stripe's policy on refunds, not ours, and it applies on every platform that uses them. A refunded €50 ticket costs you the processing fee on the original sale.
• Our commission is not returned either. We would rather say so than let you discover it. The work the platform did — selling the ticket, taking the payment, issuing it, and now reversing it — happened regardless of the outcome.

Some perspective on that last point: our commission is 1% capped at €0.50 per ticket, and it is 0% until 31 December 2026. On a €50 ticket refunded today, the unrecovered commission is nothing at all, and after 2026 it is fifty cents. The processing fee is the larger number in every case, and it is worth knowing which is which before you set a policy that absorbs them.

Refunds after a payout — the case worth understanding

This is the scenario that goes wrong on other platforms, so it is worth spelling out.

Suppose your payout has already gone out, and then a refund is issued. The refund is still honoured — the attendee gets their money, immediately, and nothing about their experience depends on your balance. The amount is then recovered from your next payout rather than written off or demanded back from you as a debt.

If your next payout is not large enough to cover it, the payout clamps at zero and the remainder carries forward to the one after. It is never cancelled, and you are never asked to send money back.

The result, which is the entire point: when a refund happens does not change what anybody ends up with. An attendee refunded the day before your payout and one refunded the day after are treated identically, and so are you. Timing is not a variable that quietly moves money between the parties.

Choosing a policy

Three that work, depending on what you run:

• Full refund up to 7 days before — generous, converts well, and appropriate when you can realistically resell. Best paired with a waitlist.
• Transfers only, no refunds — the ticket moves to somebody else rather than coming back to you. Good for events with fixed per-head costs you have already committed to.
• No refunds, stated plainly — legitimate for small, heavily-catered or strictly-capacity events, provided you say so clearly before payment rather than after.

Whichever you pick, the failure mode is the same: a policy that is strict on the page and negotiable by email teaches people to email. Decide what you will actually do, publish that, and apply it consistently.