Who refunds you,
and what we do if nobody does.
GotTickets is a primary ticketing platform, not a resale marketplace. Every ticket here is sold to you by the promoter running the event — they set the price, they set the refund policy, and their money reaches their own bank account. So they are the ones who can refund you.
That is how nearly every ticketing platform works. What is different here is the last step: if a promoter stops answering you, we step in.
Four things worth knowing
Getting a refund started
Always start with the promoter. They are the only party who can approve a refund, and going to them first is also the fastest route — most refund questions are answered the same day.
Open your ticket
Sign in and go to My Tickets. Bought as a guest and never set a password? An account was created with the email you used — reset the password and everything is there. More on finding your tickets.
Message the organiser
Use Ask the organiser on the booking. Say what you bought, which event, and what you are asking for. We pass it to them with your email as the reply-to, so their answer comes straight back to you.
Or send a cancellation request
Bookings also carry a cancellation request button, available up to 1 hour before the event starts. It flags the booking for the promoter to action. It is a request, not an automatic refund — nothing is charged back until they approve it.
Give them a few days
Promoters are usually one or two people running an event around a day job. Five working days is a fair wait before you escalate — sooner if the event is nearly here.
Then it becomes our problem
Tell us and we will step in
If you have asked the promoter and had no useful reply within five working days — or the event has come and gone with the question unanswered — contact us. We will take it up with them directly and work to get it resolved. You are not stuck just because someone stopped reading their email.
Include your order number, the event name, and when you contacted the promoter. That gets us straight to the booking without a round of questions.
Being straight with you about what stepping in means, because the honest version is more useful than a vague promise:
What we will do
- Chase the promoter directly, through channels you do not have
- Confirm what you actually bought, and what you paid
- Put your case to them and press for an answer
- Re-send tickets, or help you transfer them to someone who can go
- Act on the promoter's account where they break their own published terms
- Tell you plainly if we hit a wall, rather than letting it go silent
What we cannot do
- Refund from money we hold — your payment went to the promoter at checkout
- Overrule a refund policy the promoter published and you agreed to
- Force a promoter's bank to release funds
- Guarantee an outcome we do not control
- Decide who was right about what happened at an event we did not run
Cancelled, moved or postponed
If the promoter cancels or reschedules, the decision about refunds is still theirs, and they are expected to tell ticket holders what they are doing. In practice:
- Event cancelled outright — most promoters refund in full. Ask them, and escalate to us if they do not respond.
- Date moved — tickets normally carry over to the new date automatically. If you cannot make it, ask about a refund or transfer your ticket to someone who can.
- Line-up changed — usually not grounds for a refund unless the promoter says otherwise, since the event is still going ahead.
- You simply cannot go — the fastest fix is usually not a refund at all. You can transfer your ticket to someone else from My Tickets, and they get a valid QR code in their own name.
Never bought a transferable ticket before? Transfers happen inside your account, so nobody has to trust a screenshot and no ticket gets sold twice — the original QR code stops working the moment the new one is issued.
What you paid, and what comes back
Your total is the ticket price the promoter set, plus a convenience fee, plus card processing. The promoter receives the ticket price. The convenience fee is what funds GotTickets — it is how the platform is paid for, and it is charged per ticket.
| Ticket price | Convenience fee | Processing | You pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| $15.00 | $5.00 | $1.71 | $21.71 |
| $25.00 | $5.00 | $2.48 | $32.48 |
| $50.00 | $5.00 | $4.41 | $59.41 |
Because the convenience fee is a flat amount rather than a percentage, it is a bigger share of a cheap ticket than an expensive one. We would rather show you that in a table than bury it — on a $15.00 ticket it is the largest part of what you pay above the ticket price, and on a $50.00 ticket it barely moves the total.
The convenience and processing fees are not refundable. If a promoter agrees a refund, what comes back is the ticket price — the fee has already been spent moving the money and running the sale, and it is not returned. On the $15.00 example above, a full refund from the promoter returns $15.00, not $21.71.
We would rather you knew that before you buy than discovered it during a refund. It is also the reason transferring your ticket is usually the better move when you cannot go: the person taking it pays you whatever you agree, and nothing is lost to fees at all.
Chargebacks
If you think a charge is fraudulent, contact your bank — that is what the process is for. But if this is a refund dispute with a promoter, please come to us first.
A chargeback takes weeks, is decided by people who were not there, and often ends with the ticket cancelled and no money returned. Escalating to us is faster, and we can see the booking, the payment and every message that was sent about it.
If you sell tickets here
Refunds for your event are yours to decide and yours to issue, from the Stripe account your ticket money was paid into. Two things make that painless:
- Publish your policy on the event page. "No refunds within 7 days of the event" set out up front prevents most disputes, and it is the policy we will point a buyer to.
- Answer your ticket holders. Buyer messages reach you by email from the platform. The complaints that reach us are almost never about the answer being no — they are about nobody answering at all.
Where a promoter repeatedly ignores buyers or breaks their own published terms, we act on the account. How selling here works →
Still stuck?
Tell us what happened and we will pick it up from here. Real people, and we do read every one.