If a festival collapses and the ticket agent says it never received your money, you are still getting a refund from the agent. That is the practical upshot of the row that followed the cancellation of the Heritage Live festivals, and it is the opposite of what many ticket holders were initially told.
Heritage Live cancelled three events at stately home estates in July: Sandringham, which was due to run from 19 to 23 August with Janet Jackson, Christina Aguilera, Eric Clapton, Lionel Richie and Ricky Martin; Englefield in Berkshire, with Richard Ashcroft and UB40 featuring Ali Campbell; and Audley End in Essex, a four-night run from 6 to 9 August with Scissor Sisters, Bananarama, The Streets, Pete Tong and a Faithless headline set. The promoter is GCE Live.
The stated reason was money. Organisers said a last-minute investment and equity package fell through, and described a festival market they could no longer compete in.
Then the refunds went wrong
The cancellation statement told fans to contact their ticket agencies, and named several: Ticketmaster, AXS, Skiddle and Ticketline. Fans who did so reported being sent back the other way, told to seek their money from HeritageLive instead. One Sandringham ticket holder told the trade magazine IQ that they had bought VIP packages, were told the agent was not responsible, were told the same by the promoter, and were advised by Citizens Advice to go to whoever took the money.
See Tickets, which is part of Eventim, then said it had been the sole authorised agent for all three events, and that it had not been paid. It is refunding people anyway.
Our position remains that responsibility for customer refunds rests with the promoter, since they have failed to return the ticket sale proceeds to us to enable this. However, we do not want customers to be left out of pocket while these issues remain unresolved. We have therefore decided to fund customer refunds ourselves in the first instance, irrespective of the legal position.
That is a See Tickets spokesperson, quoted by IQ Magazine on 15 July. The promoter disagreed, firmly, and its position is worth reading because it describes how the industry normally works.
All promoters experience the cancellation of shows from time to time, and the longstanding convention has always been that the ticket agent refunds the customer in the first instance and then recovers those costs from the promoter over time. The responsibility to refund customers sits with the ticket agent, not the promoter, and customers should never be left carrying the weight of an inter-company arrangement they were never party to.
Both statements come from spokespeople rather than named individuals, which is normal for a dispute of this kind and worth stating plainly. Ticketmaster separately told IQ that it had emailed fans on 14 July confirming full refunds, but declined to say whether it or the promoter was funding them.
What to do if you are still out of pocket
Strip out the corporate argument and the practical order is unchanged, and it is the same order we set out in our guide to how a festival refund actually works.
- Go to the ticket agent first, in writing, and keep the reply. Whatever the two companies think of each other, the agent took your card details.
- Then your card provider. If you paid by credit card and a single ticket cost more than £100, Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 makes your provider jointly liable. Note that the threshold applies per item, not to your basket total.
- Debit card, or under £100? Ask for a chargeback. It has no lower limit, though it is a scheme rule rather than a legal right.
- Keep the cancellation notice. A screenshot of the announcement, the date, and any email you were sent is the evidence that supports every route above.
Why this one is worth remembering
Most festival cancellations end quietly. This one did not, because two companies publicly contradicted each other about who owed the customer, and the customer was in the middle of it.
The reassuring part is how it resolved. See Tickets paid regardless of who it thinks is right, explicitly to stop customers carrying the cost of an argument they were not part of. That is the behaviour you want, and it is worth knowing it is what happened, because the first advice many ticket holders received was wrong.
The less reassuring part is what it says about the season. Heritage Live blamed a saturated market and the cost of competing with far larger operators, and it is not the only casualty this year. If you are holding tickets for anything later in the autumn, it is worth checking that you paid by a route that gives you a fallback, rather than assuming the event is too big to fail.
For everything still going ahead, our what's on pages carry events with dates and venues confirmed by the organisers themselves.
