Beyond our primary concern for the health of our communities, our hearts ache for our clients who are facing the reality of having to cancel their weddings and events in the coming weeks and months. We’re also feeling for our fellow artists and event professionals who are living with the sudden uncertainty of income as the COVID-19 pandemic progresses. Given the circumstances, we wanted to make transparent our policies for event cancellations and postponements, and some additional steps we’re taking to help folks on both ends cope with this difficult process.
Our existing cancellation policy:
Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, our policy has been as follows:
Deposits are non-refundable, and artists staffed for a cancelled event are paid 50% of their contracted rate
Cancellations will not be accepted within 45 days prior to the date of the event. If the event is cancelled after this time the client is responsible to pay Golden Bell the balance due
Golden Bell will not be held responsible for the inability to perform due to police or government official closing down location of event, fire, war, or Act of God.
Our new policy for COVID-19 related cancellations or postponements:
Given the circumstances, we believe that increased levels of compassion and leniency are important. While we wish this could be as simple as moving an event to a date in the future, the reality is that this is often impossible. Most of our weekend dates in 2020 are full, and we can’t guarantee that the team of musicians we would have staffed on an event will be available later in the year. Additionally, we’re holding our commitment to pay any musician we’ve staffed for a cancelled event at least 50% of what they were expecting, something we find to be extremely important given the sudden lack of work for this community. With all this considered, we’ve updated our temporary postponement policy to be as follows:
Although deposits are non-refundable, we’re now welcoming you to apply them to a future date under certain conditions below:
Events cancelled or postponed with greater than two-week’s notice may be rescheduled to an available non-holiday weekday (Sunday through Thursday in 2020) and 100% of your deposits paid may be applied to this new booking
Events cancelled or postponed with less than two-week’s notice may be rescheduled to an available non-holiday weekday (Sunday through Thursday in 2020) with an additional and 50% of your deposits paid may be applied to this new booking (to cover a portion of our staffing costs already incurred)
For clients who wish to reschedule their events to an available weekend or holiday date in the future, 50% of your deposits paid may be applied to this new booking (for context, we’d be operating these events at cost and not be able to profit from these events at this discount level)
How we’re supporting musicians around their canceled or postponed events:
We’re continuing to honor our contractual obligation to pay artists for cancelled events:
Musicians will be paid 50% of their contracted rate for events cancelled or postponed with greater than two-week’s notice.
Musicians will be paid 100% of their contracted rate for events cancelled or postponed with less than two-week’s notice (provided we’ve received the final balance)
Musicians staffed on a particular event will have the right of first refusal on rescheduled events
This has been a difficult process for us all to wrap our heads around, and we’re really trying to do our best to do right by our clients and our team of musicians. We appreciate your consideration and understanding here as well as we all try to move forward.
Sincerely,
- The Golden Bell Team
