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 24 hours in advance, any no-show without prior warning makes you eligible to claim the full lesson fee by following the procedure outlined below.
By default, Sherpa allows students to cancel for free with up to 12 hours notice. See the full refund policy here.
Don't Forget!
If a student gets in touch with you ahead of the lesson session starting (10 minutes before), remember you can reschedule the start time without needing confirmation from the client side to allow postponing a session.
To prevent any miscommunication and breakdown of 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 through Sherpa
This will notify them via text and email that you are waiting for them. Usually, 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:
1. Decide whether a refund is within your interests
Withholding a refund from new students due to user error 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.
2. 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.
You can visit your Completed Bookings page to grant a partial refund. Full details on how to do this are here.
3. 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.