Terms of Purchase

Talks

We do not refund or transfer Talk bookings.

Workshops/Seminars/Courses/Masterclasses

We do not provide refunds. Please notify our office at least 14 days by email before the event if you wish to cancel your booking. We will give you a transfer for a like for like booking within 2 months only. We will transfer your booking to another single, similarly priced event taking place within 2 months of notification. 

Retreats

We do not refund or transfer retreat bookings.

What is a concession?

Please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions page for full details on what qualifies as a concessionary rate.

Email booking policy

In order to book for one of our events either online, by phone or by post, you must provide an email address.

If you do not provide one, we will not be able to process your booking.

Please do not assume, if you post a cheque to us without providing us with an email, phone number, or your postal address, that your booking will stand. We cannot make a booking on this basis and will destroy your cheque.

The only instance where we currently do not need an email address is if you pay on the door at an event. However, this is subject to change in the near future, and of course there is a risk that the event is sold out.

Updates to our programme

We occasionally have to make changes to our programme: a venue may have to change; very occasionally events are cancelled; and we may also add to our calendar of events. While we do everything we can to ensure that our brochure is up to date at the time of printing, things can change over the course of the four months or so that the brochure programme covers.

Our most up to date information is on our website; please check our website before you travel. We are not liable to refund to the cost of either your booking or your travel expenses if the information about an event was available either online or via email, even if this was at the last minute.

Sell-out events, Returns and Latecomers.

If you have purchased a ticket and do not arrive by the scheduled start time for an event, you forfeit your ticket. Wherever possible, we will allow you into the venue, however sometimes this may not be possible and is entirely at Alternatives' discretion.

If an event has sold out and ticket holders have not arrived by the scheduled start time, we will release any non-attendance tickets to those non-ticket holders queuing at the door, so that we avoid the situation where there are empty seats and people waiting outside who might have had a wonderful evening or day with us.

For non-ticket holders: if you wish to take the risk and travel to a sell-out event in the hope that there will be seats available as 'Return' tickets due to non-attendance, you are welcome to do so, at your own risk. While seats often become available at the last minute due to non-attendance, Alternatives cannot guarantee that you will be admitted on a Return ticket.

Return tickets: there are no discounts for Return tickets sold on the door due to non-attendance, even if you are a Member. This is because our normal ticketing procedure will not be in operation. For sold out events, you will not be able to book online while queuing for Returns using your phone or tablet and take advantage of your Member's discount because our normal ticketing process will have already released the maximum number of tickets.

Waiting list for sell-out events.

If an event has sold out, please join the waiting list.

There are three good reasons! Firstly, tickets often become available (in which case, the entire waiting list is notified and it is a case of first-come-first-served); secondly, this helps us get a picture of the demand for a particular event or speaker; and thirdly, when that speaker or event returns, we will notify you!

Membership

We are always happy to welcome new members to Alternatives! Thank you for joining us – we are very happy to have you with us and look forward to seeing you whenever you can make it. Our aim here at Alternatives is to offer events and experiences that help us all to grow in consciousness as individuals and as a community, and our community is important to us – many of us know each other by name.

In order to make your membership with us as fulfilling as possible, and to make it practical and fair for us to administrate, we want to be clear about what a Membership with us means. Please read the following before signing up. When you buy a membership, by clicking onwards from the Checkout page, you are agreeing to these terms and conditions.

Just purchasing your membership?

Wonderful! Please bear in mind that in order for your free ticket to be applied immediately to an item in your Shopping Cart, your Membership must be the first thing in your Cart. We cannot add free tickets retrospectively at any stage of your membership.

Visionary Members

At the start of each calendar month, your free ticket to one of our Monday Night Talks becomes available. (Your discounts apply across the board for the whole year.) We will send you an email reminder each month so you don’t have to remember! And your free Monday Night Talk can be in any calendar month, so you can use October’s free ticket on a Talk that takes place in December, for example.

Seeker Members

You’ll receive three free tickets to Monday Night Talks over the course of your year’s membership. Our membership system will remember this – there is no need for you to keep a tally. If your membership is not offering you any free tickets, this is because you have used them all for your year. (And you might like to know that Visionary Members receive a free ticket every single month…)

Cancellations

Once you have gone through the Checkout process with your free and/or discounted tickets, the same terms and conditions outlined above will apply equally to members and non-members alike. For example, if you booked for a Monday Night Talk using a free ticket and then were not able to attend for any reason, you are not eligible for that free ticket to be effectively cancelled and reallocated.

Priority Notification

We will give you advance notification of our most popular events in order to give you a short but significant window of opportunity to book ahead of non-members. Please be aware though that once the general booking is opened up to everyone, members do not receive priority booking over any other Alternatives customer – the advance notification is the advantage that your membership bestows – and it is up to you to be aware of the notifications that you receive to the email address you gave us when you signed up, and then to act on them. We can’t find extra space for members at events that are sold out.