Cancelling a market day: weather calls, refunds and the phone tree

Decide the rules before you need them

Write a weather policy while the sun is out and publish it where stallholders apply: what conditions cancel the market, by what time the call is made, and what happens to stall fees. The content matters less than its existence — a 6am cancellation lands completely differently when everyone knew 6am was the deadline.

Most markets refund stall fees in full for a day the organiser cancels. It's the single strongest trust signal you can give stallholders, and it's cheap: a cancelled day has no site costs either.

Make the call once, not forty times

The real cost of a cancellation is the communication: every booked stallholder needs to hear it, fast, before they load the van. A phone tree at 5:30am is how days off become the worst day of the month.

On StallsApp, cancelling a market day is one action: every booking on that day is cancelled, card payments are refunded in full automatically, and each stallholder is emailed with your reason. The audit trail records every refund, so the money side reconciles itself.

Tell the shoppers too

Your market's public page shows the day as cancelled the moment you call it, which quietly answers the "is it still on?" traffic your socials would otherwise absorb. Post it everywhere you promote the market anyway — the shopper who drove in to a locked gate remembers.

After the day

A short note to stallholders once refunds have landed closes the loop and costs nothing. If cancellations are becoming a pattern, that's venue information, not bad luck — wind-exposed sites and unshaded summer car parks cancel more, and the data from a season of calls is worth having when you review the site.