Retreats and multi-day workshops: pricing the first payment
The first instalment is not a round fraction of the price. It is whatever you have already spent on that person, plus the runway you have left.
The first payment is a floor, not a fraction
Most retreat pricing starts in the wrong place. Someone picks a round share of the total — a third, a quarter, whatever last time was — and builds the schedule downward from there. The number feels reasonable because it is tidy, and tidy is not the test. The first payment has one job on the day it is taken: cover what you cannot get back if the person who just booked never arrives, and take the place off the market. Work those two things out and the percentage falls out of them on its own. Start with the percentage and you find out in the third month that a quarter of the price was less than the rooms you had already committed to on their behalf.
A multi-day programme makes this sharper than a single evening does. You are not holding a seat; you are holding a bed, a place at a table for six services, a share of a facilitator who is in the country that week and no other. Those are bought early, in blocks, on a headcount you had to guess. By the time a guest changes their mind, most of what their place cost you has already left the account.
Start from what the booking already commits you to
List what each confirmed place has actually spent, per head rather than in total:
The venue's own deposit, and the dates after which it stops coming back to you.
Accommodation and catering minimums — the headcount you guaranteed to hold the week, which you pay whether or not every bed is filled.
People you engaged for those dates: a teacher, a chef, a guide. Their travel is booked months out and is rarely refundable.
The small, irreversible things. Materials, permits, local transfers, insurance, printing. Each one is minor and together they are not.
Divide that by the number of places you are selling and you have your floor. If one place costs you two hundred and forty before anyone arrives, a first payment of a hundred and fifty means every cancellation costs you ninety pounds of your own money for the privilege of having taken the booking. That is not a schedule problem; it is a pricing error the schedule has made visible. Raise the first payment above the floor, or write a cancellation term that collects the difference later. Do one of the two before the first guest books, not after the first guest withdraws.
The runway sets everything after it
The second number is the distance between the day they book and the day they arrive. Ten months and six weeks are different products at the same price. With a long runway you can put four or five dates in between, each small enough that nobody has to plan around it, and the first payment can sit near the floor because there is room behind it. With six weeks there are two or three dates at most, so the first payment is larger by arithmetic alone.
So one schedule does not fit everyone on the same programme. Decide the rule once — a first payment at or above the floor, instalments every four weeks after it, everything cleared a set number of days before arrival — and let the booking date generate the dates. The alternative is inventing them one booking at a time, which works for the first nine and stops working somewhere in the twenties.
Say plainly what the first payment holds
There is a ceiling as well as a floor. A first payment of sixty per cent is not a schedule, it is a deposit with an apology attached. Someone who could comfortably pay that much at once did not need dates in the first place, and someone who could not has just been told no in a way that sounds like yes. Keep the first payment near the floor you calculated, not near the total.
Then write down what it buys, in the same place the guest agrees to the dates: that it holds a specific place and room type, that it fixes the price, which amounts leave which card on which days, and what happens if payments stop — what is kept, and when the place goes back on sale. The test is whether a guest reading it eight months out could tell you, without asking anyone, what they have paid for and what they still owe.