Pretty pissed off about this – paid £99 per ticket last year, booked accomodation etc. and they’ve just announced that the charity that runs it has gone into administration. The Term and Conditions state that there will be no refunds in the event of cancellation, so that’s nearly £200 down the swanny and a long weekend in Looe with no music!
Looe Music Festival – cancelled!
by 38 Comments
Oh no.
The Monkey Sanctuary is worth a visit.
Donkey Sanctuary.
Cervantes little read follow-up to Don Quixote
Eden Project is half an hour away. Polperro, just along the coast, is nice.
Barcelona is just up the A387 for a comedy place name sign snap.
A mate lives in Plymouth, I could ask him if you like.
Interestingly eclectic line up, too. (The festival, not the Monkeys)
Did you pay by credit card, in which case you should get it back? Less sure about debit card, somehow less likely.
No refunds? Sounds illegal to me.
Definitely – it’s breech of contract at the very least and you should be able to sue for the refund. Although your prospects of getting it aren’t good if they’re in administration. You’ll be an unsecured creditor and far down the list of those who’ll get any money.
Did you pay by credit card? If so, you should be able to claim from the provider as they are jointly and severally liable for the breech.
I paid via Paypal, although the majority of that was charged to my credit card, so I am going to pursue those channels.
We never read this stuff, do we..? Reading this again, I think the cancellation line (5) could be referring to the adverse weather condition cancellation at (4)…
1. The right of admission is reserved.
2. Tickets will not be exchanged, refunded or returned after purchase. Lost tickets will not be replaced.
3. Availability of tickets is not guaranteed. A limited number of each ticket type have been issued. Licensed capacity is finite.
4. Management reserve the right to alter or in the event of adverse weather conditions to curtail or cancel the performance.
5. There will be no refunds in the event of cancellation.
6. Management reserve the right to add, withdraw or substitute artists, and to vary or cancel the advertised programme if necessary.
5 looks like an unfair contract term to me but it’s a long time since I did consumer law. As I recall, you should be able to claim the lot from the card provider but I’m not sure how the involvement of paypal affects their liability. It probably makes no difference but I can’t say that for certain.
It might be possible to make a complaint of “non-delivery” or something via PayPal, and see if they charge it back.
I’ve just had a very animated conversation with Paypal and they don’t want to know…ooo, I did get cross!
a) I bought the tickets over 180 days ago and that is the dispute limit
b) They don’t cover tickets anyway, only physical goods
However…Paypal took most of the money from my credit card so I should be able to recover most of the money through Visa.
Lesson learned…don’t use Paypal for significant purchases!
D’oh!
and it’s only physical goods where the transaction is online* so, for instance, if you advertise a car online to sell it and somebody says “oh i’ll buy that” and you arrange to meet them, they paypal money to you, and you hand over keys, they can reverse that transaction and there’s nada you can do about it.
I know this, because I went to sell my mam’s car (with her consent, obvs) and had three offers of the asking price within 90 minutes of the advert going live, all wanting to pay by Paypal.
*by which i mean that you underake, electronically, to post something to somebody rather than deliver it in person
“The Term and Conditions state that there will be no refunds in the event of cancellation…”
If that’s true I will announce a couple of festivals soon, cash in on ticket sales and then cancel the lot. That’s my pension funds sorted then.
Rule number 5 from their Ts&Cs on the website:
There will be no refunds in the event of cancellation.
Seems pretty straightforward, m’lud.
Best of luck to anyone who has lost sponds. If I still lived in Plymouth, I’d have been down a couple of hundred too.
I don’t think that’s a T and C that would stand up to challenge. It as already mentioned if they’ve gone into administration the chance of getting the money back from them is pretty thin, sadly.
Going to Looe and nothing happening? Laxatives might work.
The Star Inn in St. Just has a great Jukebox. Or did 30 years ago. This is probably not very helpful.
The Cornish seaside village of Portreath is rather nice. And – hurrah! – it has seven brand new, free public toilets. That’s more than there are in the whole of Stockholm!
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-new-public-toilets-in-seaside-town-of-portreath-cornwall-england-uk-164960164.html
I just had a week in Portreath. The new public toilets are nice, but there’s always a queue of about 30 people waiting to use them. If you do head towards Portreath, save yourself the bother and go to the next bay along at Porthtowan instead.
The place we liked best was Trebah Gardens near Falmouth. 90 mins each way from Looe, but worth the trip. Take your trunks and swim at the private beach.
Public toilets, eh. So what’s the sea for? OK, OK, not funny, but I was distressed at Trelissick, another fab cornish gardens, to see a fella piddling beside a tree, in full view of passers by. And I mean full view.
You should have been at the Eden Project when Primal Scream played a gig there a while back. The crowd had to be asked to stop pissing on the plants.
That’s nothing. (The following is NSFW!!!)
https://youtu.be/vTjeud99Y7c
Well, that wouldn’t damage the plants…or frighten the horses by the look of it.
Mevagissey is well worth a visit (pretty harbour) as are the Lost Gardens of Heligan if you like a roam about.
Also, it seems a trip over to Bude (bit of a mission from Looe) could be worthwhile…
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-45401354
We were in Bude two weeks ago! We live in Devon, so trips across the border are fairly frequent!!
Ha ha – I’ve given you a fairly pointless suggestion, sorry about that, I didn’t read enough further up.
The Beverley Festival did something similar earlier this year. No refunds to the people who bought advance tickets, and my understanding is that they were selling tickets right up to the minute they cancelled the festival and simultaneously announced that they were insolvent. I must say that when encouraged to buy an earlybird ticket at a discount it might occur to me that the gig could be cancelled, but it wouldn’t occur to me for a minute that I wouldn’t get my money back. On that basis no-one should ever buy an advance ticket for a festival
I may be wrong here, not being a lawyer, but I imagine they’d definitely be guilty of fraud if they’ve continued selling tickets for an event that they know isn’t going to take place. Is all the money accounted for and have Trading Standards or the police got involved?
Standard advice is that if there’s any risk of not getting what you’ve paid for, you should use a credit card, so that you can claim from the card company if things don’t go right with the transaction.
That’s one reason I’ve kept a credit card account (with a zero balance). The other reason to have a credit card is for foreign transactions where a debit card cannot be used.
I use PayPal for my monthly Spotify account payments only.
Had an interesting conversation with my bank today – apparently you are as protected with, say, a Visa debit card as you are with a Visa credit card. On Vince’s point, I think buying an advance ticket with a credit or debit card is protected, just don’t use cash, cheque…or bloody Paypal! On the last point, I really had a go at Paypal for allowing this lot to use their services when Paypal knew damn well any buyers would lose their money without any recourse if things went belly up…not that my rant would make a ha’peth of difference…bastards!
When I use PayPal, the money is just coming out of my Visa debit account, so that’s where I’d go to seek redress. Am I missing something?
In a sense..! My Paypal account had an amount of money in credit from sales via ebay. So, when I bought the tickets using Paypal it used that amount and took the balance from my registered card (thankfully this was the majority of the amount for the tickets). If I had had a large amount accrued then it would have just used that balance to pay the vendor and not touched the card.
I see! I’ve never had any balance with PayPal – the whole transaction cost comes from my linked Visa debit account.
Now that I’ve read this thread, I’ll be sure to keep things that way!
That’s not true. The legislation that covers credit cards does not apply to debit cards; I know this because I used to be responsible for it.
Of course, a bank can unilaterally decide that they will give cover with respect to their own issued debit card but it’s a flawed assumption that all debit cards give equivalent protection.
Banks can do chargebacks re debit card but this is at their own discretion. It’s a much better bet to use a credit card if you have one.
Top tip on credit cards is the Saga card (55+ peeps) doesn’t charge for foreign currency transactions – handy for the hols/foreign website purchases e.g. music, software etc.
This just popped up on my FB feed, fwiw.
We’ll, that didn’t go so well…
Statement from Looe Mayor Cllr Armand Toms on behalf of the town.
“We are deeply shocked and saddened by the news that Looe Music Festival charity is going into administration and therefore the Festival in its current format is cancelled.”
“We were expecting to welcome thousands of visitors to the town over the 3 days of the festival, many of which may have already booked and paid for accommodation, travel and time off work.” “Many local people and businesses have come to rely on this late summer revenue from the festival to see them through the winter months so we just can’t sit back and do nothing.”
“As Mayor I am concerned about the loss of reputation of the town.”
“We just ask ticket holders, residents, businesses and performers to give us a few days breathing space to see if we can come up with a plan B”. We are asking for the towns patience, help and support to make this happen.”
Details will be posted on the town council and Looe Tourist Information centre social media accounts in due course.
This has been on the local BBC news for the last few days as it is a big story down here and more is seeping out about the background to this. There are stories of bands not getting paid last year and techies refused to work last year as they weren’t seeing any money. The organisers are refusing to talk to the BBC, unsurprisingly I guess, but the Plan B seems to be a few pubs putting bands on. I feel a bit sorry for the Mayor as at least he has fronted up and apologised.