Most races do not allow refunds. This of course frustrates runners who may get injured or have other priorities emerge. There are three reasons to allow refunds:
- You have a Waiting List of people who will take the spot.
- You want to have a runner-friendly race that gives runners more flexibility and encourages them to sign up for your race. Of course the hope is you attract more runners, or you make a few people happy.
- Exceptions.
- Race Directors do the processing. We give the race director an easy way to either remove a runner without a refund, or remove a runner with a refund (and you can take a fee out for this service).
- Runners do the processing. They can log into the account and see their races in their Profile page and submit a refund there.
RunSignUp automates the whole back end for Race Directors. You can set up a deadline for refunds to be X days before the race, and you can set a fee.
RunSignUp does not refund the original processing fee, and we charge an additional processing fee according to our standard rates to do the refund. For example a runner pays $25 for a race plus a $2.50 processing fee when they sign up. The refund would be $22.50 because we take an additional $2.50 out for processing the fee. Race Directors can set fees above this amount to help discourage runners from getting a refund as well as increase revenue to your race.
The reason for the fees is to offset our costs. The credit card companies do not give us a credit for refunds, and actually charge us again. Since they charge more (and we do not save the customer’s credit card information for security reasons in RunSignUp), we actually send a check to the runner as the refund. To enable refunds, we will hold a reserve amount that we pay from. We default this to 10 registration fees. That of course gets paid back to the race when the refund period ends. If the refund reserve is exhausted, then runners are automatically not able to get a refund.
The two videos below show how a Race Director can do refunds and how a race director can enable runners to get their own refunds:
Enable Runners:
Race Director Processing:
