Upstate Photographers

FAQ – Wedding Cancellation Policy

When we accept a retainer fee for your wedding day, we remove that date from our availability calendar and do not accept any other bookings for that day – it is yours!

Most weddings are booked a year or more out from the wedding date. This means that if you cancel your wedding or change your date, it will probably be impossible for us to find another booking for the date we had reserved for you, resulting in a significant loss to our business. Consequently, retainer fees are not refundable under any circumstances, or for any reason.

If you cancel your wedding date for any reason, you must notify us in writing before the day of the wedding, or the entire contracted final balance is due.

In addition, if you cancel within two months of your wedding day, any payments made before the cancellation are not refundable. Payment must be made for any services already performed (engagement session, etc.).

If we agree to issue a refund for any payments made beyond the retainer, our policy is to issue refunds within 30 days of receiving notification of cancellation.

If and when we do issue a refund, we issue the refund only to the person who physically made the original payment to us. So, for example, if the bride pays for the retainer with her own credit card, the refund can only be issued to her – not to the groom, the groom’s parents, or anyone else. Similarly, if  the groom’s parents and bride’s parents each write a check for  half of the amount, then half the refund will go to the groom’s parents and half to the bride’s parents. In other words, refunds always go to the person who actually made the payment to us, regardless of the source of the funding.

In general, we purposely keep our retainer fee large enough so that people take it seriously, but small enough that it’s not going to cause you financial ruin if you must cancel your wedding for some reason. If you are concerned about the possibility of loss of retainers paid to your photographer, venue, caterer, limo service, DJ, florist, etc. — you may wish to investigate the option of purchasing wedding insurance.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 11:06 pm. It is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.