I have discovered that it is not unheard of for paddlers to
- enter a competition.
- Cancel their entry
- Change their mind and ask to be re-instated
There are often good reasons for this, but it doesn't always make things easy for the organiser or for the online entry system.
The system can now cope with these if the original cancellation happens before payment has been taken from the paddler's account. However, I've had a couple of instances where paddlers have cancelled after payment has been taken, this means that the cancellation instigates a refund to the paddler's account which goes through our systems fairly quickly. Once that happens we are pretty much stuck.
The only solution I can come up with is to delay the processing of refunds until after the competition has happened. In essence this would mean that the organisers process cancellations as the currently do, but if refund is required this will not be given to the paddler until after the competition.
This could mean a three to four week delay in money being return due to a cancellation, but would mean that we could revert the refund and re-instate where necessary.
Is it fair/reasonable to delay refunds in this way, bearing in mind that it would penalise the many for the sake of a few?