Picture the week before a retreat, or the day before a kirtan you're hosting. Someone writes in because they got sick, someone else because the weekend stopped working for them, and a third person just changed their mind. None of these are disputes — they're the ordinary churn of running events for people whose lives don't always cooperate with a calendar. Answering each one by hand, checking the date, deciding the amount, issuing the refund, is a small tax that adds up across every event you run. Self-serve refunds let you write your policy down once — a percentage and a cutoff — so that any request landing inside it is handled by BrightStar without you touching it. A request that falls outside your stated policy isn't refused and isn't silently ignored either. It becomes a case, waiting for your decision, exactly as if the attendee had emailed you directly.
Setting your policy
The Self-Serve Refunds step appears in the event wizard when you first build an event, and again as a feature panel on the event manage page afterward, so you're never locked into whatever you chose at setup:
- 1Turn the feature on for the event
- 2Set a refund percentage — what share of the ticket price comes back
- 3Set a refund deadline in days before the event, after which self-serve stops
- 4Optionally enable event credit, with its own percentage, as an alternative to cash
- 5Optionally enable ticket transfer so attendees can pass a ticket to someone else instead
- 6Add a custom policy message that attendees see on their refund page
Is there a BrightStar-wide refund window?
No. BrightStar doesn't impose a universal refund window across events, because a five-day sound healing evening and a ten-day retreat abroad don't call for the same policy. The percentage and the cutoff are set by you, per event. If you run many events and don't want to configure each one from scratch, you can set an account-level default that new events inherit automatically. If you set nothing at all — no per-event policy, no account default — self-serve refunds simply stay off, and every request that comes in arrives as a case for you to decide, one at a time.
How a refund request gets resolved
BrightStar checks a request against your settings in a fixed order. First, whatever you configured for that specific event applies, if anything. If the event has nothing set, BrightStar falls back to the refund defaults in your organizer communication settings. If neither is in place, nothing auto-resolves — the request opens as an organizer case rather than being either refunded or rejected outright. Only one outcome is allowed to happen without you: an instant cash refund that falls cleanly inside an active policy. Anything that would resolve to event credit instead of cash, to no refund at all, or to a date past your cutoff, is routed to you for a human decision rather than processed silently in the background.
What the attendee sees
Ticket holders manage their order from their own ticket management page, where a refund request sits alongside transfer and, where you've turned it on, credit. They choose which tickets the request covers and can add a reason for asking. If the request is inside your policy, the refund is processed and confirmed right there — no waiting on you. If it falls outside your policy, they're told plainly that it has been sent to you rather than being shown a dead end or an error. It then appears in your refunds queue under Dashboard, Communications, with the attendee's stated reason attached, so you can approve or decline it with the full context in front of you.