Someone books a ticket to your retreat, your kirtan, your weekend of breathwork — and then life happens. They can't come. On BrightStar, that moment doesn't have to end with money going back out through the payment processor and the relationship ending with it. Event credit lets you offer that person a way to hold the value of their ticket and put it toward your next gathering instead. It's not a workaround or a private email arrangement you have to manage yourself — it's an offered path, sitting right next to the refund option, that the attendee can choose on their own.
How credit works
When an attendee tells you they can't attend, credit shows up alongside a refund as one of the choices available to them. If they take it, their ticket is released — so the spot opens back up for someone else — and the value of that ticket is held as credit belonging to them. They spend that credit at checkout on a future event of yours, the same way they'd apply any other payment. Nothing about this requires you to track who's owed what in a spreadsheet; the credit stays attached to that attendee until they use it.
Why credit costs you less than a cash refund
Here's the part that matters for your bottom line: when you refund a charge, the processing fee on that original sale is not returned to you. You already paid it once, and refunding doesn't get it back — so a refund is quietly more expensive than the ticket price alone suggests. Credit sidesteps that entirely, because the money never leaves your account in the first place. That's why a full-value credit can actually cost you less than a partial cash refund would. You're not shortchanging the attendee to save money — you're choosing the option where nothing gets lost to the processor at all.
Turning on credit for your event
Event credit lives in the same place you already manage refunds, exchanges, and transfers, and it's controlled per event rather than as a blanket account setting.
- 1Open the panel where your event's refund, exchange, and transfer settings live
- 2Turn on event credit for that specific event
- 3Choose what percentage of the ticket value becomes credit when someone takes it
- 4Leave it off if you'd rather not offer credit — the option simply won't appear, and refund requests will follow your regular refund policy instead