Allowing attendees to defer their registration to a future event date can be a good option to provide your attendees with some flexibility without having to issue refunds if they can't attend the event for personal reasons, or to allow your attendees to move their registration to a different date when an event date is cancelled.
Add a Deferral Option
Creating a deferral option for your event can be as easy as adding an additional registration/ticket type! New sign ups can select it as their ticket of choice, and through our post registration tools, existing attendees can change their ticket to the future year in just a few easy clicks.
- To add a new a new ticket or registration type for deferrals, follow these instructions: How do I create tickets or registrations?
Offering Deferrals for Major Event Changes
If you are creating a deferral option in response to a major event change or cancellation, you may prefer to add it as an updated question in order to record yes or no from everyone.
- The best way to do this is to set it up as a purchase, with or without a cost. You can find instructions for how to add a purchase here: How do I set up purchases to upsell my event goers?
In the case of a major change, postponement or cancellation, you'll also want to be sure to communicate with your attendees about the change.
- Check out these articles for additional information:
How do I cancel an event?
How do I communicate rescheduling or postponing my event?
When someone makes a change, they will receive a new confirmation email. You can put a custom message onto your new deferral registration, or add a message into the existing confirmation email for when someone selects an answer to the new purchase question.
- Please check out this article for a guide on custom confirmations: How do I customize my confirmation emails?
How can I transfer deferred ticket buyers to the new event?
In order to move deferred attendees to the new event, you’ll need to have created the new event listing. If the event is similar, we suggest copying the existing one and making some updates to be ready for the next event date.
- See more instructions here: How do I copy an event?
Once the new listing is created, you can move attendees from the old event to the new one. If you have people letting you know one by one, it might be the easiest to give them a promo code and send them to the new event listing to complete their registration.
Or, if you anticipate having a large amount of attendees to move, an attendee upload will make this easy to finish.
- See here for instructions to complete an attendee upload: How do I upload offline registrations/tickets?