For ticketing
Ticketing platforms: postponements, cancellations, and festival-scale refunds
Event cancellation is mass refunding at maximum emotional velocity: fifteen thousand orders, promoters paid months ago, press covering hourly. Ticketing platforms hold the trickiest merchant-of-record position in events — selling on behalf of promoters who control the outcome — and Connect’s defaults decide who bleeds during cancellations unless someone decided otherwise deliberately. Add-ons, insurance legs and fee structures multiply the arithmetic precisely when attention is scarcest.
The cancelled festival, quantified
Modelled: 15,000 orders at $95 average, platform fee 8%, promoter paid out weeks prior. Cancellation refunds $1.42M from platform balances; promoter-side transfers total $1.31M stranded-at-risk in one event. Whether that becomes recoverable depends almost entirely on payout scheduling chosen months earlier and clawback execution quality over the following fortnight.
- Orders × price
- 15,000 × $95 = $1.425M
- Promoter transfers outstanding
- ~$1.31M
- Per-order fees retained
- ~$114k — policy call
- Recovery window
- days–weeks, decaying
Per-order fees: keep-or-return at scale
Booking and processing fees have their own refund policy decision, amplified 15,000-fold during cancellations. Keeping them funds the operational cost of executing the cancellation itself — defensible when terms disclose it. Deciding during the crisis guarantees inconsistency across the queue.
Add-ons and insurance: separate legs, separate math
Insurance add-ons often ride as separate charges with separate merchants; parking and merch as separate legs with separate transfers. Multi-leg refund logic applies — whole-order refunds meeting partial-leg reality, the exact cell where naive implementations over-recover from innocent parties.
Postponement exchanges masquerade as refund-plus-repurchase
Rescheduled events implemented as cancel-and-rebuy double every movement — two transfers, two refunds, two reversal opportunities per order. Exchange-native implementations halve the surface area. Either way, the reconciliation must treat exchanges as first-class flows rather than noise between real events.
What FeeGuard does about it
Historical scans replay cancelled-event windows and report stranding by promoter, event and leg; bulk correction workflows handle the fortnight after cancellation; and monitoring catches the exchange-flow drip between dramas. Payout-schedule consulting for future events starts with the numbers this data provides.
Common questions
Can we hold promoter funds until event date?
Payout scheduling is the lever — rolling payouts post-event converts cancellation disasters into manageable recoveries. Trade-off: promoter cash-flow conversations happen earlier.
Who eats the refund: platform or promoter?
Merchant of record absorbs mechanically — the platform on destination charges — then recovers from promoters per contract. Clawback execution quality decides the final split.