dealing with cancellation and Reschedules Due to COVID
In my last post, I covered how your retainer fee, cancellation, and reschedule policies are going to determine your choices when dealing with requests for cancellation and rescheduling. Assuming that your contract is well drafted, you have the choice to uphold or waive the terms.
If the couple is requesting cancellation, from a customer service standpoint, the best option is to refund all the money. At this stage, for dates during the shelter in place order which goes until April 7 for now, the couple can’t perform under the contract even though they want to, and you can’t perform the contract anywhere else, even though you want to. As requests for cancellation of dates get further out, like May and June, I think it’s fair to say let’s wait and see because there’s no advantage to cancelling right now, versus closer to the date if the wedding may be carried out later. For requests to reschedule, encourage your couples to reschedule for a weekday later in the year. This will almost ensure that all the vendors and the venue will still be availble.
For dates that are being cancelled in the later months, if you are one of my clients, remind your couples that you don’t have the benefit of working from home and continuing to earn a living during this pandemic, and that is why your policies and contract are drafted to ensure your livelihood in a worst case scenario, such as the one we are currently living.
I’m already getting reports that some couple are upset that some vendors are returning half of the retainer as a gesture of goodwill, instead of the full amount. If you are electing to give a full refund, please be sure to inform your clients that this is your choice and that other vendors may not be required to refund them any earned fees, inlcuding retainers.
Remember, you are part of the indusrty, a large whole. Do right by your clients, do right by your business, and do right by your peers.
***UPDATED APRIL 16***
When I wrote this original post, only the 5 major Bay Area counties had orders to shelter-in-place and guidelines for safer-at-home where more of a suggestion than a prescription of no gatherings over 10 poeple. Clearly a lot has changed in that time. Regardless of whether your contract has a force majeure clause or not, we are living in a force majeure situation that has the legal effect of blacking out dates during the order. This means that all events and bookings that fall in the dates that are subject to the state order are effectively cancelled and the retainers are refundable if the client elects to cancel instead of postpone. Think about is this way, even if you were able to book a repalcement event for the same date, you would not be able to perform under that contract either, and as a result, you are not able to keep money for a day that you’re not able to save.
On the same note, for clients who want to cancel their September wedding (relative to April when this was written), I believe it is too early to determine if they will be impacted by a safer-at-home order, so their request would be subject to the normal cancellation and rechedule clauses of the contract. Thus, if you have a good and enforceable retainer clause, you should be able to keep the retainer for a September cancellation. Whereas if the clients wait longer until it is closer to the actual wedding date they can either a) go forwad with the wedding becasue it’s fine and safe to do so, or b) we’re still in quarantine mode and their retainer is refundable for the same reasons above.
Be reasonable and remember that you can only be compensated for what you’ve earned, everything else is a windfall that a court won’t enforce. On that same note, if you have terms in your contract saying that the final payment is non-refundable if cancellation occurs within X days of the wedding, you’re going to be very sad and embarrassed when your client challenges you and wins. If you have a template from a very famous lawyer photographer (who is unlicensed in California, BTW) you should look into getting your contract professionally done because you’re not going to like the terms you’re bound to in this template.
Desiree Nguyen Orth is a California licensed attorney and former photographer who owns Desiree Nguyen Legal. Desiree Nguyen Legal is a modern law firm for creative small business owners using a holistic approach to legal protections and damage prevention. The information provided is for educational use only and does not constitute legal advice or solicitation. No attorney-client relationship is formed by commenting or submitting anything on this site. Please contact Desiree Nguyen Orth or an attorney barred in your state for individual legal attention.