Sherpa protects your time and reputation when honouring the agreement made to parents and students by confirming a booking.
As payment for lessons is collected upfront, 24 hours in advance, any no-show without prior warning makes you eligible to claim the full lesson fee as long as the tutor adheres to the correct procedure outlined below and there are no serious mitigating circumstances that come to light. Evidence for this may be required where necessary.
Sherpa wants you to decide what you find an acceptable amount of notice or excuse for cancelling or not showing up to a lesson. Remind yourself of the automated cancellation policy in place for students.
Please Note
If a student gets in touch with you ahead of the lesson session starting (10 minutes before), remember you can reschedule the start time, should you find this appropriate, without needing confirmation from the client side to allow postponing a pre-booked session.
To prevent any miscommunication and breakdown of tutor/client relationships, if a tutor expects to be paid for the missed lesson in its entirety, they MUST take the following 3 steps:
Send a message to the student over the platform messages
This will notify them via text and email that you are waiting for them. Sometimes students have just forgotten and they can join promptly with minimal interruption.
Wait 20 minutes past the start time for them to join or respond
This is a good amount of a grace period to give your students before abandoning a lesson. Even though they may join this late, the majority of the lesson time remains.
Remember you have been booked and paid for this lesson time. You must respond to any messages from the student up to 20 minutes into the time slot and make every attempt to salvage the lesson time if they let you they will show up late.
Send a final message and abandon the lesson if there is no contact
If there is still no contact after the 20-minute mark, send them a message stating you are abandoning the lesson and marking it down as a no-show.
After the lesson time has elapsed, consider the following outcomes:
Decide whether a refund is within your interests
For new students, please understand that parents or students may not be used to the system quite yet. Withholding a refund from new students due to user error or technical issues will likely impact the relationship between you and the client and prevent it from developing into a long-term agreement.
Similarly, exercise your limits of leniency for loyal customers who may have forgotten or had unforeseen issues as a one-off, but deny this to repeat offenders.
Consider a partial refund to keep both sides happy
In most cases, a compromise may be preferable. If the student is unhappy with being charged the full amount based on their circumstances, and you are willing, you can settle for a partial refund.
The student can request a full refund through the dispute process and you can decline and respond with an offer of a partial split that you deem is fair. Sherpa will approve this after an independent review.
Alternatively, you can partially refund an agreed amount yourself from your completed bookings page using the 'Refund' button.Decline to refund and keep the full lesson fee
Sherpa collects payment in advance to ensure tutors are paid for their time and preparation for an upcoming lesson. Provided you have completed the 3 compulsory steps of due diligence to confirm a "no-show" to a lesson you are entitled to keep the full lesson fee.
Sherpa will investigate any disputes to ensure these steps have been met.