Statement about tickets refund!
A lot of questions have been asked on this topic, and this time we will try to clarify the situation regarding the refund for purchased tickets 2020/2021.
MetalDays is a festival run by a small company owned by just two people, without sponsors, investors, silent partners, and without any financial assistance in terms of the partnership.
In March 2020, when the pandemic started, the company had 6 full-time employees and 6 part-time employees. Today, the company has no employees for a simple reason; we cannot afford to have employees. To date, we have not received any state aid worth mentioning. We were simply closed overnight, and we were prevented from working, and that forced us to lay off all employees, which hurts us a lot because everyone contributed to the raise of MetalDays.
All have families to feed and care for, and letting them go really hurts.
The usual Festival circle is 18 months. This means we organize the festival 18 months in advance.
In March 2020 we had a big part of the production for festival 2020 paid already, VAT paid, as well as advances for bands, and we were already working on the 2021 season.
We booked bands for 2021, had Artworks prepared, had all production deals arranged, and so on. In addition to MetalDays, we also organized the New Metal Festival, Winter Days of Metal, OverJam Reggae, Headbanger’s Holiday and Bluesland. All the mentioned festivals were then in the "building up" phase and were funded by the profit we were able to make with MetalDays.
These are all reasons why we are not able now, and in the past 18 months to meet all the requirements for a refund.
Who would expect the whole world to collapse under the covid pandemic? Who would think we had to copy everything to 2021, and then again to 2022? Unlike us, European festivals have received state aid in the total amount of the requests for a refund, unfortunately, we have not received such aid, and we will not receive it.
We are left on our own to solve it as we know and can.
The situation in our industry is extremely serious, and we have no clear idea how to overcome all the problems that we face at the moment.
Returning refunds will take a very long time, but we will do our best to fulfill all the requests. Refunds are being processed gradually, for more up to date information please check our website regularly.
A lot of ticket owners who asked for a refund were impatient and hired lawyers and consumer protection bureaus. They have all right to do so and we do not condemn them. We even understand them. We really do. So far, we have been able to solve all such problems, but in case the number of such interventions increases drastically, the only thing left for us will be to declare bankruptcy due to force majeure and start from the beginning with a new company.
We sincerely hope that will not happen. We ask for patience and understanding while we fight extremely difficult situations. We are so sorry for not being able to refund all requests right now.
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Thanks for the support you provided the last two years!
Without you, there would be no MetalDays.
