Mark,
I hope your response was directed at Keith and not at me. He said something about refunds being part of the cost of "doing business." As you said, most people who host regattas do not consider it a "business," except insofar as preparing a budget and figuring out how much they need to charge and how much sponsorship they need to get to cover their costs -- and, hopefully, make a little money for their fleet or club to apply toward future events and ongoing expenses of the organization.

This is all very complicated, and pre-paid preregistrations make it even more complicated. Here are the potential scenarios:

1) You do it the old-fashioned way and have no idea how many people are going to show up until you do registration on site. If you were expecting 20 boats in two classes and you end up with 60 boats in six classes, you are in trouble because you have to hustle at the last minute to get more stuff. If you were expecting 60 boats and got 20, you are also in trouble, because you already got all the stuff and are going to be in the hole financially -- and there is going to be way too much beer for those people to consume.

2) You take pre-registrations via your website (but unpaid)just so you have some clue as to how many people PLAN to attend, so you can better budget for trophies, T-shirts, beer, food, etc. It's still a crapshoot, but at least you have a little better handle on what kind of attendance to expect.

3) You take pre-registrations that are also pre-paid by credit card or check in the mail. Now it is more complicated, because you may have some people asking for refunds because they could not attend the regatta -- personal illness, shoulder dislocated, death in the family, lost job, house got flooded, yadayadayada.

To avoid putting the regatta organizers in the position of having to make case-by-case decisions on such cancellations and refunds, I think the cutoff for prepaid registrations should be at least a week before the regatta itself and that should also be the cutoff date for requesting refunds if you cannot attend the regatta for ANY reason.

The problem with that policy is that it will make people more hesitant to pre-pay their preregistrations.

4) And if regatta organizers have to, very close to the actual regatta date, cancel or postpone the event, they also have the problem of wondering whether to refund the money to people who did pre-pay, even though that will leave them with no income to cover all the advance expenses that have already been paid -- trophies, beer, t-shirts, etc.

a) If the event is postponed to a later weekend and people who pre-paid cannot make it to that later event, they may ask for their money back. So how can this eventuality be covered in the notice of race?

b) If the event gets totally canceled, in advance, because of a major problem, it seems logical, and only fair, that all the pre-paid registrants would have to be reimbursed, and that the club is going to have to eat their losses for what they have already paid out and hope that the beer will keep and that the trophies and T-shirts can be re-done for next year. In this kind of situation if you did not reimburse the people who pre-paid, you would never be able to get anybody to pre-pay again.

c) And then there is the problem of the regatta that is NOT canceled in advance, but because of weather conditions, no races can be run. In this case, I think everybody who registered and paid prior to closing of registration on the date of the event should not ask for or be given a refund for ANY reason.
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I'm not saying that I am not in favor of pre-paid preregistrations. This obviously takes a burden off the race organizers. I'm just saying that it can cause lots of NEW potential problems for the race organizers, and that those need to be addressed somehow in the Notice of Race.

The big challenge is to eliminate what may be perceived as a "risk factor" for sailors who pre-pay. Like, is there a situation where I might pay in advance and lose my money, whereas all the people who were going to pay at the last minute on site are saying, "Boy, am I glad I didn't go to that one"??