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The ten per cent of departures the weather takes

Operations Published July 16, 2026 3 min read

Nobody sells a tour business on this, and every operator spends a chunk of every season doing it. In the shoulder seasons, ten to fifteen per cent of boat departures do not go — and each one is a decision, a set of refunds and a round of phone calls.

The decision itself is yours and no software will make it. What software decides is how long the next two hours take.

What has to happen, in order

  1. The departure closes. Nobody else can book the trip you have just decided is not running. This is the step most systems get wrong, because cancelling and unpublishing are different actions in most of them.
  2. The seats come back. If two of your tours share the boat, cancelling one has to release the boat for the other. Otherwise you have cancelled the sailing and kept the hull booked.
  3. Everyone is told once. One message per booking, not per person, and not five separate ones because someone re-sent it.
  4. The money goes back, or the date moves. Most guests would rather move than get a refund, if moving is offered in the same message. If it is not offered, they ask for the money.

Why the phone is the expensive option

Twelve seats is three or four bookings. Four calls at ten minutes, in the middle of a working afternoon, on a day when you are also moving a boat. Do that eight times a season and it is a working week.

The cost is not really the time, though. It is that the fourth call gets skipped, and someone shows up at the dock.

Refunds are not free. When you refund a card payment, Stripe does not return its processing fee. On a weather cancellation you are out roughly 2.9 % of what you never earned. That is the same at every provider — worth knowing before it surprises you, and worth mentioning in your cancellation policy.

What to promise guests

Be specific about the deadline and vague about nothing else. “We decide by 4 pm the day before and you get a call, and either a new date or your money back” is a sentence a guest can plan around. “Subject to weather conditions” is not.

Operators who put the deadline on the tour page get fewer questions on the day, because the guest already knows when to expect the answer.

What this means for your website

Cancelling a departure releases its seats and the boat it was holding, so the tour sharing that hull opens up again immediately. Everyone booked on it is refunded, with one message per booking.

Free-cancellation windows are set once and measured to the departure time, not the date — nine in the morning on the day of a 18:30 sailing is still before it.

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