Date Changes
A brief recap of our Terms & conditions
Thank you for your booking with Flour Will Fly. We are a small, independent business dealing with a high volume of requests for date changes. To ensure a fair transaction between our customers and our business, we allow changes up to 30 days before the date of your event. We do not allow changes within 30 days of your booking and we make no exceptions to this rule. We kindly ask guests to check whether your booking is eligible for date swaps before contacting our team. All tickets are transferable.
Why does Flour Will Fly work use this policy
We receive several requests for date swaps every day. In our early days, our team generously accommodated all requests for changes and, unfortunately, this had a devastating effect on our business. To address this issue, we adopted the terms and conditions (T&C) that are widely used in our industry where we do not allow date swaps within 30 days of your event and we make no exceptions to this rule.
We understand that plans change, emergencies come up and that you might need to arrange the date of your class, but, unfortunately, we cannot stay viable as a business unless we consistently apply this policy.
How does this policy help Flour Will fly stay viable as a small business
When we hold tickets for you, we expect a level of income for a class. Allowing date swaps at short notice mean that that income is taken away from that class and that your place needs to be re-assigned to another class, depriving us from the opportunity of making a new sale.
We are often questioned whether we can’t simply resell the tickets that we have been holding for you. Unfortunately, our chances of re-selling the unused tickets decrease significantly as we approach the date of the class. More often than not, we end up not selling those tickets and having to deal with the burden of the lost income.
“but, why can’t I get a refund if I am not attending the class?”
We add classes to our website roughly 3 months in advance and we guarantee your place in the class (with the promise of a refund if your circumstances change) up to 30 days before your class. This is a risk we can take as a business: customers buy a ticket, we take that ticket off sale, but this same customer might then return it, meaning that we then need to put more work into reselling that ticket.
Within 30 days of your event, we can longer take that risk, and our T&Cs entitle us to keeping the value of your booking, even if you don’t attend the class, as we are unlikely to resell your tickets.
Think of the seats in an aircraft: if you wish to make a date swap, the seat the airline held for you becomes empty. Unless the airline manages to resell that ticket, it will lose out once the date of that flight comes around and the plane leaves with the empty seat. Big business have resources and cash flow behind them to withstand the burden of the lost income. Flour Will Fly is a small, independent business and regrettably we are not in that position.
“can’t you just advertise the unsold tickets on social media?”
We have a growing following on social media and we are often asked whether we can’t simply advertise the tickets on our stories to generate interest. We understand how this might make sense in theory, but unless the tickets are advertised with plenty of time in advance, they do not sell. This is because taking a weekend class is commitment that many people like to plan ahead to, so, more often than not, we end up not reselling the tickets.
What does flour will fly does to let customers know about this policy
Before we book: for transparency, we highlight this on our booking form, stressing that this is something that is included in our full terms and conditions. All bookings require customers to agree to our terms and conditions before proceeding.
After you book:
Our Terms & Conditions page is available on our website: our T&Cs are available on our website and customers are encouraged check them before and after making a purchase.
Before you contact our team regarding a potential date swap: you are currently on our ‘Date Changes’ page on our website, which was created to provide our customers with context as to why we use this policy.
After you contact our team regarding a potential date swap: all enquiries sent to our email address and all contact forms submitted on our website trigger an automated response that we highlight our policy on date swaps. The response is triggered as soon as we receive customer enquiries, meaning that customers are instantly provided with information, regardless of how long we take to get back to their enquiry.
Can guests pass on the tickets to someone else?
Nothing makes us happier than seeing our workshop full of people, enjoying our classes. For this reason, we encourage guests who can’t make the class to pass the tickets on to someone who could make use of them. If we may please just kindly ask that you let us know whether or not someone is taking your place as we prepare your ingredients and food in advance, and if no one shows up it all goes to waste, which is something we do our best to avoid.