Say you’re planning a wedding and your betrothed gets cold feet or you both decide you’d rather elope than shell out $30,000 to eat overpriced chicken and do the electric slide with a hundred guests. Or maybe you’ve booked a vacation, but you break your leg or your boss won’t give you the time off to enjoy your tropical getaway.
Until recently, you were at the mercy of the merchant’s cancellation policy.
Deposits to wedding vendors are typically nonrefundable, and depending on when you cancel, you could still be on the hook for the contracted amount. Likewise, you can typically pay a premium for a fully refundable airline ticket or hotel room, while the cheapest rates often come with the strictest cancellation policies.
[See: 12 Ways to Be a More Mindful Spender.]
Fortunately, a growing number of secondary online marketplaces are aiming to change that. Similar to how StubHub serves as an intermediary to help people resell concert, sports and other entertainment tickets, these marketplaces help you resell experiences you can’t cancel and recoup some of the money you’d otherwise lose. There’s no guarantee that they’ll find you a buyer, but typically you’ll only pay the marketplace if the resale is successful; conversely, if the broker is unsuccessful, you’ll only be on the hook for the money you paid to the original merchant.
Here’s a look at three categories of resale options.
Weddings
Kyle Tysvaer, a Rhode Island-based wedding photographer with Insightful Eye Photography, felt bad keeping the deposit from a former bride whose wedding was canceled. Still, he was counting on that contract to pay his bills. “I really wished that I could work for anyone that day as opposed to keeping half [the former bride-to-be’s] money,” he says. That frustration led him to create Steal My Wedding Day, an online marketplace that allows couples to transfer their vendor deposits and contracts to someone else instead of paying the entire cost.
Tysvaer says it’s a win-win situation for vendors and couples because the buyer receives a discount and the vendors receive 100 percent of the contracted amount, plus the opportunity to upsell. “If the bride booked a wedding for 100 people and I find someone with a 125 people, the venue just sold 25 extra people,” he explains.
Tysvaer takes care of notifying the vendors and confirming that they will transfer the contract to the buyers; in some cases, the vendors themselves refer couples to the company. In exchange, Steal My Wedding Day takes $2,000 or 20 percent (whichever is larger) from the seller.
Peter Ulrich the founder of Canceled Weddings, another wedding resale marketplace, spun one of his companies, YachtWedding, a destination wedding agency, into another business for similar reasons. Users create a free matchmaking profile and get paired with weddings and honeymoons available for sale. Interestingly, it’s not only engaged couples buying discounted canceled weddings. “Someone’s canceled wedding might become a fancy birthday party for someone else or a wedding abroad opportunity for a foreign couple or a vow renewal,” Ulrich says.
Canceled Weddings lists weddings and honeymoons from around the world, including Austria, Thailand, Spain, the U.S. and the U.K. Ulrich says most wedding cancellations in the U.S. happen several months in advance. “There is still a lot of space to adjust the wedding to your personal requirements and have the wedding exactly the way you want, whether it be the guest count, catering [or] flowers,” he says. “Brides can even assemble their wedding out of several canceled bits from different sellers and still enjoy the process while saving big,” he adds.
With both Steal My Wedding Day and Canceled Weddings the amount you recoup and the likelihood of a resale varies depending on several factors, including how much you’re willing to discount the price of your wedding and how desirable the selected date and venue are to prospective buyers.
[Read: 10 Ways to Save Money on Your Wedding Day.]
Flights
Some international carriers, including Eurowings and Ryanair, allow you to transfer a booked flight ticket to another passenger’s name. And services such as Jumpflight and Jetta provide a resale market for buying and selling your plane ticket. On Jumpflight, once you create an account and post your flight details, potential buyers can message you through the site and you contact the airline to transfer your ticket. Conversely, Jetta takes a more proactive approach by actually verifying the ticket’s transferability. The discount amounts vary, but currently Jetta has flights listed for 40 percent off between Tel Aviv and London and half off between Glasgow, Scotland, and Paris.
Hotels
Business and leisure travelers stuck with a noncancelable hotel reservation can post their rooms for sale on marketplaces such as Cancelon and Roomer. Representatives from both sites say the average room discount is around 45 percent, but that varies depending on factors such as seasonality, the property’s popularity and what the seller is willing to accept (Cancelon has an eBay-like feature where you can negotiate the price if desired). If and when a room sells, Roomer charges the seller a 15 percent fee, while Cancelon imposes a 10 percent fee.
Richie Karaburun, managing director, North America, at Roomer, says hotels are happy to accommodate their request for a name change on the reservation because it provides hotels with incremental revenue. “In many cases, the hotels really want the heads in the beds, especially five-star hotels,” he says. “When your new guest comes in, they spend money on the hotel Wi-Fi, casinos and spas,” he adds. Roomer receives listings anywhere from three days to three months prior to the reservation, according to Karaburun.
Efrat Kaul, Cancelon’s co-founder and head of marketing and business development, says 30 to 40 percent of the site’s listings are for the coming week. Both Roomer and Cancelon resell hotel rooms via travel partners such as Kayak and Trivago, which increase the likelihood that someone will buy your reservation because they don’t have to know about or go to Roomer or Cancelon to purchase.
[See: 10 Oddly Practical Things You Can Rent.]
One selling point for buyers is that they can use these marketplaces to book a room at a hotel that would otherwise be sold out during high-demand times such as the Super Bowl, the Olympics and college graduation. “It’s a win-win for everyone, because the seller doesn’t lose all his money and the buyer gets a really good bargain,” Kaul says.
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How to Resell a Canceled Event or Trip originally appeared on usnews.com
