Festivals Editing and Proofreading Services

The forecast turns at eleven on the Saturday morning. By two the site is closed, forty thousand people are being moved, and the only thing standing between the festival and a year of chargebacks is a paragraph written eight months earlier by somebody who did not expect to need it. What that paragraph says about partial days, tickets already used and refunds versus credits will decide whether the event happens again.

We edit what festivals produce — terms and conditions of ticket sale, cancellation, curtailment and refund policies, site information and audience guidance, artist and supplier contracts, licensing and event management plan documentation, accessibility and inclusion information, volunteer and steward briefings, and the communications issued when something goes wrong. Our editors work on the documents that are read on the worst day.

The cancellation and refund policy is the clause that decides whether a festival survives a bad weekend, and its failure is a sentence about circumstances beyond our control doing the work of a policy. Audiences accept a cancelled event; they do not accept an unclear one. We work through these so cancellation, postponement, curtailment and a change of line-up are treated separately, since these are four different events and a single clause covering all of them satisfies nobody; so the refund position states what is refunded and what is not — the face value, the booking fee, camping, parking, the charity donation — because the booking fee is where most complaints start; so a partial event is addressed with a stated formula, given that "one day of three" is exactly the case a policy usually omits and the one most likely to happen; so the alternative to a refund is described honestly, as a credit for next year is a reasonable offer and a compulsory one is not; so the deadline and the mechanism for claiming are stated with what happens to people who miss it; so the position on travel, accommodation and other losses is stated plainly rather than left to be inferred; so the line-up clause says which changes give a right to a refund and which do not, since a headliner pulling out is the second commonest crisis; and so the whole thing is written to be read by somebody who is angry. Policies written this way get a festival to the following year.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including policies, contracts, licensing material and incident documentation. We are editors rather than event managers, insurers or lawyers, and we offer no legal advice and no view on refunds, licensing or safety. What we can do is make the policy answer the question that will actually be asked.