Due to the uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak and after careful consideration we have had to make the difficult decision to cancel HandyCon August 2020.
Our number one priority is the safety of everyone who attends and not only is it a very real possibility that government restrictions may still be in place in August, but we also have a responsibility to do the best we can to protect the health and ensure the safety of our community. We realise that this may seem a little premature for an event planned to go ahead in August, but there are many planning and financial implications in delaying the decision further and we also wanted to make a clear decision for those attendees who have been planning well ahead for travel and childcare etc.
We will be issuing full refunds for all entry tickets and merchandise purchases over the next few days. This does not require any action on your part, but we ask that people are patient as we have to process each transaction individually. Note that in our previous update we stated that refunds would be subject to a 5% processing fee due to PayPal no longer returning any fees incurred on the original transaction when issuing a refund. Since this update, PayPal has temporarily suspended these changes until 30th April, meaning that we will be issuing refunds in full. We are unable to transfer tickets to future events.
If you have booked to stay at the Holiday Inn then your booking will automatically be cancelled and refunded in full within the next few days. This also does not require any action on your part. We advise that anyone with reservations elsewhere cancel their bookings as soon as possible.
We know many of you will be very disappointed and we will miss seeing you too. We are very lucky to have such a great community of people surrounding our event and it has been wonderful to see many of you playing games remotely and using tech in new ways to facilitate continuing friendships forged at previous HandyCons.
We will be monitoring the situation closely and are not discounting the possibility of running an event sometime later this year, but we hope you will understand that until the situation has stabilised we cannot commit to doing so. We hope that HandyCon January 2021 will remain unaffected but will continue to update our decision-making criteria with new information as it arrives and provide updates when we can.
Stay safe and we thank you for your patience and support.
– The HandyCon Team
