A large number of travel plans and events have been, and are being, cancelled or postponed due to COVID-19. Following our travel and event articles looking at these issues from a customer perspective, we now look at the issues this could raise from a business perspective.

Following on from our initial article regarding travel cancellation we now consider event cancellations and postponements.

Events – what are your rights?

Event Cancellations

If an event your company or an employee is due to attend is cancelled or postponed because of COVID-19, you may be able to obtain a refund depending on the terms and conditions applicable at the time of sale.

The first port of call is to contact the provider and request a refund if it isn’t automatically offered in the case of cancellation or if you are unable to attend a new date. Where you accept a postponement, it will be important to bear in mind that new terms and conditions (including additional fees) may apply to your re-issued tickets or new dates.

For example, INTA’s Annual Conference was due to take place in Singapore in April 2020 and INTA informed its registrants that it would be offering an automatic refund on tickets purchased. A new date and location has now been announced, but those wanting to attend will need to re-book.

It is likely that you will need to deal with the travel and accommodation aspect separately to the cancelled / postponed event.

Supplier Cancellation

Given the current social distancing measures and the UK government’s ban on public gatherings of more than two people (bar funerals), many suppliers and venues are cancelling (or offering to postpone) corporate parties and other special events.

If your supplier cancels, you will be entitled to your money back. However, if you are required to cancel, you may not receive a refund for fees already paid (deposits cannot be ‘non-refundable’ so ask for a breakdown as to why a deposit cannot be refunded). In either case, you should be aware of what the relevant terms and conditions say and what rights you have. It is also worth discussing with the supplier to see whether you can postpone to a later date or whether they plan to make additional dates available (we appreciate this may be difficult as we do not know how long the ban may last and when customers or clients are likely to want to gather in groups again).

Given the circumstances, your supplier may claim that COVID-19 is a force majeure event, preventing it from providing the services to you. This is more likely if your company is in a long term supply agreement with the relevant supplier. If you receive such a force majeure notice, you should get in touch with your legal team or Kemp Little, as what events constitute a force majeure event, what relief is available and what the requirements and consequences of invoking this provision are, will all depend on the terms of your contract. There may also be more commercial options available to address the parties’ key concerns rather than invoking force majeure, and we have been assisting a number of clients with practical, interim arrangements to achieve their preferred outcomes.

Accommodation

We address accommodation cancellations more fully in our first article, and those comments will also apply here.

Essentially, where you no longer wish to keep your accommodation booking due to event cancellations or postponements, your first port of call should be the booking conditions or cancellation policy relevant to your booking. These will tell you whether your booking is changeable and/or refundable. Even in cases where a non-refundable booking has been made, we still recommend speaking to your provider as they may be prepared to offer a refund or credit, or offer to change the booking.

Other considerations

Chargebacks – please see our comments in the first article but you may have some recourse depending on how payment was made.

Where your employee has made the payment for the event costs, and claimed this expense back from the company, you will need to address the situation in accordance with your expenses policy. We expect that where the employee can seek a refund of the costs incurred, the company will request that the employee does so (as the company will be unable to do this on behalf of the employee) and it may choose to cancel or reverse the expense claim on that basis. Where there is no legal entitlement to a refund, and a voucher is issued, it will be prudent for the company to ask the relevant provider to issue the voucher in the name of the company, so that it can be used by any employee in the future. However, it is likely that these situations will be dealt with on a case by case basis.

Insurance – If your company is left out of pocket because of event cancellations, depending on the nature of your event, you may be able to claim against event insurance, ticket insurance or as part of your travel insurance. If you took out one of these specialist policies, or have general travel insurance, it will be worth checking whether you could claim under your policy.

Policies will differ in how they deal with loss and cancellations due to government advice/orders (and the FCO advice) and pandemics (it is worth noting that COVID-19 was only declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation on 11 March 2020). However, unfortunately, pandemics are widely excluded from insurance policies in general. This means that many insured businesses are likely to be left out of pocket where events have been cancelled.

Find all our Covid-19 related advice here.

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