Cancelling and postponing events

Running events is currently illegal almost everywhere. If you planned an event in the next weeks, you will likely need to cancel or postpone it. pretix is here to make your day easier, even in this situation:

• Inform your attendees as soon and as clearly as possible on the status of your event and the refund process. This way, you avoid additional costs due to credit card or direct debit chargebacks by your customers. Use pretix' e-mail feature to make sure you reach everyone.
• If you need to cancel your event, we've recently added blog posts on how to refund all tickets and how to allow your users to request refunds individually.
• If you need to postpone your event, just change the date in pretix and inform your attendees via e-mail. You should then give them the option to request a refund.
• We will credit ticketing fees that we already invoiced to you to your customer account, so you'll pay less for your next event with us.

Limiting damage and getting support

To limit the economic damage due to the cancellation of your event, we've collected a few tips for you. In particular, if you have a community that cares about your event, you can utilize some special pretix features to make it easy for your attendees to support you in these rough times. Combined with a good communication strategy, this can help you prevent the worst.

• Instead of refunding all tickets immediately, you can offer your attendees our self-service cancellation option and ask them to voluntarily only receive a partial refund to support you. Read our blog post to learn how.
• Create a gift card shop and ask your customers to buy vouchers that can be used to buy tickets after the pandemic. It's like a free loan for you, and for your attendees it's an easy way of supporting you while still getting their money's worth.
• We're happy to advise you on producing and shipping high-quality paper tickets for gift cards or solidarity tickets, even in low numbers. These can make for an exclusive keep-sake your fans can show off: "I helped with the rescue!"
• If you're in Germany, you can find up-to-date information on governmental aid on the website of the Bundes­wirtschafts­ministerium as well as on the website of your state. Don't speak German? Feel free to ask us for help.

Taking your event online

Obviously, you cannot replace every event with a virtual gathering and we can't have everything we love about events in the digital space. However, there are more possibilities than you might think, and at a very affordable price, given that there's no rent or catering cost.

Your workshop can become a webinar, your coaching can become a video call, or your concert can become a live stream. Of course, you can use pretix to sell tickets for all of these as well! You're not bound to a specific tool either, but you can use almost any webinar or live stream software. Please talk to us and we'll be happy to help you choose the right one for your plans.

For more complex events, you can combine all of these into one event experience: Live streaming, video calls, text chat, audience questions. All of these in one interface is what venueless is all about, a new platform for digital events, developed by ourselves and some partners.

One of the hardest aspects to take online is the networking part of your event. For many business events, networking is just as important as the actual content. We're therefore happy to present you two partners of ours who can help you bring this aspect online through their innovative platforms: The digital conference solution by ascrion and the event community app talque. Both systems are already connected to pretix through our API, so you can continue to sell your tickets as usual.

Individual consulting and support

This is a unique situation for us as well. But we're here for you, like always. Our team of experts can be reached for questions on this and many other topics via phone or e-mail. We're all in this together, and we're talking to event organizers with the same problems as you on a daily basis. We're happy to discuss your options with you – even if it's not about pretix.

Additional blog posts around COVID-19:
Why your payouts are not endangered