SHORT NOTICE CANCELLATIONS ARE A KILLER
To earn a living, our normal workload involves planning and putting together a tiptop schedule of 250 great workshops with nearly 100 tutors, getting the info together and publishing all on the website, ready for you to book. After that, all we usually need to do is deliver what you’ve all paid for! Everything else – the bookings, payments, confirmations, reminder emails etc, are all designed to be automated. Of course there is always some admin time involved in cancelling and transferring bookings if needed, but the level of these is relatively small and at a level that we expect and plan for.
Now imagine the work that’s been involved in rescheduling those 200+ workshops along with all your bookings to 2021…. the liaison with all the individual tutors over workable dates, then the communication with all of you. We’ve emailed you all individually with each new date, then we’ve followed up at the beginning of this year with a reminder and a full summary of all your bookings via email. We’ve sent blanket email communications at each stage to keep you all up to date with our plans, so you’d know what we were doing. Then of course, with Lockdown II, we had to do all that again – moving the rescheduled Spring 2021 dates to Spring 2022.
All that work is in addition to the normal level of administration that we factor into our pricing, but it was worth it to enable us to keep going.
Then there is the impact of reducing our maximum workshop numbers to keep everyone safe. While it seems that everything is opening up and we’re all relaxing and getting back to normal, this is the MOST critical time for us and many other small businesses. You’ve all been so patient in waiting for your workshops, leaving your payments with us until we could deliver, and we are so grateful for that. However, it’s all for nothing if you cancel your place at short notice now….
Everyone is so busy cramming in the family visits, holidays, weddings and celebrations and outings that we’ve all missed so much. But it means that short notice cancelled places are very difficult to fill at the moment while everyone is so committed. So, even if you don’t want a refund and are happy to take a credit to use another time, we could be left with an empty space that we can’t resell; an empty space that might be the difference between breaking even and making a loss; an empty space that someone else could have enjoyed if they’d had more notice…and worst-case, an empty space that could mean that ArtisOn doesn’t actually survive long enough for you to use your credit.
Please, please, after all the work and waiting we’ve all done, check you bookings well ahead of time and don’t leave cancelling until the last minute – giving us more notice, gives us a fighting chance…not cancelling at all is obviously even better!
