Cancellations and refunds

How your money is held

When an organiser approves you for a seat, your card is charged and the money sits with FishSplit. It is not passed to the captain, and it is never passed to the group who posted the seat.

It only moves when the captain confirms the trip ran. If it doesn’t run, the same money goes back to your card. Because it never left us, a refund is a refund and not an attempt to recover money from somebody who has already spent it.

If the captain cancels — including weather

• You are refunded in full, automatically. Every seat, the whole amount, no fee kept.
• Refunds go back to the card you paid with. Banks typically show them within 5–10 days; the timing is theirs, not ours.
• You’ll get an email the moment it happens. You don’t need to ask for it.
• The captain owes nothing and is charged nothing for cancelling. We would rather a captain called off a marginal day than felt pushed into running it.

If the group who booked the boat cancels

• You are refunded in full, automatically — same as a captain cancellation.
• If they rebook for another date it appears as a new trip. Your seat does not move with it, because the new date has to suit you too.

If you cancel your own seat

• Before the organiser approves you: withdraw your request any time. Nothing has been charged.
• After you’ve paid: contact us and we will work it out with the organiser and captain. Be straight with us early and it usually ends well.
• We are honest about the reason this isn’t a one-click refund: the boat is booked and the price is for the boat. A seat you drop late may be a seat nobody else can fill, and the cost of that falls on the group who booked it, not on us.

No-shows

• If you don’t turn up, your seat is not refunded. The boat sailed, the captain is owed and the seat was held for you.
• Be at the dock at the time on the trip page, not the time you think is reasonable. Charters leave on time; that is the whole culture.
• If something genuinely went wrong on the day, tell us. Repeated no-shows will lose you the ability to book.

If the trip isn’t what was described

• Read the house rules before you pay — they are on every trip page precisely so that a dry boat, a meat trip or an adults-only trip is never a surprise.
• If the trip was materially different from its listing, report it and we will look into it. Persistent misdescription costs an organiser their account.
• A bad day’s fishing is not a misdescription. Nobody, least of all the captain, can promise fish.

Our fee

FishSplit takes 8% of each seat sold, and only when a trip actually runs. If a trip is cancelled we keep nothing.

The fee comes out of the seat money, not on top of it: the price on the trip page is what you pay.

Who operates the trip

FishSplit is a booking platform, not a charter operator. The trip is run by a licensed captain who carries their own insurance and is responsible for the vessel, safety and the conduct of the trip. Their word on whether it is safe to sail is final.