For operators already delivering great experiences, here is what refund protection does for your business.
There’s a moment that accesso clients know well. A guest’s plans fall through: a sick child, a flight cancellation, a weather event, and they need to talk about their booking. Your team wants to help, but the conversation is awkward, and the outcome is rarely clean. You either absorb the cost or disappoint someone who was genuinely looking forward to the experience.
What’s harder to see is the version of this problem that never reaches you at all. The guest who wanted to book three months out but couldn’t shake the question of what happens if something comes up. Who kept the tab open, thought about it, and eventually just didn’t book. That hesitation doesn’t show up anywhere in your reporting, but it’s just as real as the refund request that does.
Refund protection addresses both. And for accesso clients, it’s already built in.
How it works
accesso‘s dedicated refund protection partner is Teak, a purpose-built platform backed by FanShield, Teak’s licensed insurance brokerage. FanShield works with AM Best-rated carriers to ensure every valid claim is paid, so guests can book with confidence and partners can focus on what they do best.
Guests see the option at checkout, clearly presented as optional with transparent terms, so they can choose to protect their purchase as part of the normal booking flow. The checkout widget is configured to each client’s environment, so the experience fits naturally within the existing purchase flow.
If something comes up and they need to cancel, the path forward is already in place. They file a claim, submit their documentation, and everything is taken care of from start to finish. Your team isn’t involved in the guest support process, the communication or the reimbursement.
Consumer adoption is up 21% year over year, a sign that guests increasingly expect protection to be part of the experience.
Example guests see at checkout
What changes with refund protection
The most immediate impact is operational. Guests who have protection and need to cancel have a clear, defined path and one that doesn’t involve your staff. That alone takes significant pressure off your customer service team, especially during high-pressure periods like bad weather days at a ski resort or sellout weekends at an attraction. But the broader business impact goes further:
- New revenue at checkout: Refund protection creates an entirely new ancillary revenue stream that requires no additional headcount or infrastructure to support.
- More advanced bookings: When guests know they are protected if something goes wrong, the hesitation around early commitment shifts. Weather risk, travel uncertainty, family logistics, or situations that make people pause carry less weight. That means more advanced bookings, and better revenue predictability.
- Fewer chargebacks: A clear path for resolution means guests are less likely to dispute a charge. Protected refunds are handled before they ever become chargebacks.
- Guests who come back: Guests who feel supported when plans change are more likely to return. When unexpected situations are handled fairly and transparently, the resolution becomes part of the overall guest experience, helping build long-term trust and loyalty.
Proven results, significant upside
More than 170 accesso clients are live with Teak across attractions, ski, and live entertainment and the scale of what’s being managed on clients’ behalf is substantial. Over 3,500 events have included ticket protection within the past year:
- 6M experiences protected
- 9,400+ consumer support and refund requests handled
- $1.1M in refunds paid out to guests
Every resolution is handled end-to-end, without touching client operations.
How does it play out across markets?
Attractions
As discussed above, timed entry has structurally changed the exposure profile for attractions. Combined with the general trend toward earlier booking, driven partly by capacity management and partly by guest preference for securing popular dates, the window of uncertainty that protection covers has expanded.
For high-volume attractions managing thousands of daily reservations, even a modest reduction in day-of plan changes has a measurable impact on team capacity.
“The partnership with Teak has been seamless on a technical, financial, and customer service basis and has exceeded our expectations. I would recommend any attraction consider offering the service.”
— Joe Carey, Senior Manager of Product Delivery, Six Flags
Live entertainment
High-demand events drive strong advance purchase behavior and concentrate chargeback exposure in a narrow post-sale window. When an event has a limited resale pathway and a fan can’t attend, the only available options are absorbing the loss, asking the venue for an exception or disputing the charge. Venue operators who don’t give fans a better option get the dispute.
Protection gives fans a defined path that doesn’t require the operator to get involved. For venues managing paperless or non-transferable tickets specifically, the absence of any options makes protection more valuable, not less.
Ski
Ski resort operators face a particular concentration of refund pressure in the period between the close of season pass sales and opening day. Guests have committed months in advance to a season they can’t yet see. Weather uncertainty, delayed openings, and limited terrain create a high-volume window where refund requests and chargeback disputes sit waiting.
For resorts building pre-purchase strategies as a demand-shaping tool, protection is directly complementary. Asking guests to commit earlier requires giving them more confidence that the commitment is safe. Ski adoption is up 50% through Teak across the accesso network, and overall ski volume has grown 163.6%, reflecting what happens when guests who previously held back on advance purchases feel protected against the primary reason for hesitation.
What are the objections and what does the data say?
Guests don’t want to be upsold at checkout.
The concern is legitimate. Insurance-style add-ons have a history of feeling coercive or opaque, and a poorly presented offer can create friction at exactly the wrong moment. The Teak widget is configured to match each partner’s checkout environment to be optional, transparent, and skippable in one click. The 21% year-over-year growth in consumer adoption suggests guests who see the offer are increasingly choosing to take it, which is a signal about relevance, not pressure.
We already have a generous exchange or credit policy. Isn’t this redundant?
Exchange and credit policies are operator-funded and operator-administered. Every accommodation your team makes is a cost absorbed by your margin. Refund protection is funded by the guest’s choice to purchase it and administered entirely by FanShield, Teak’s licensed insurance brokerage, without touching your staff or your accounts. There’s also a segment of guests who specifically want a cash-back resolution, not a credit and not a reschedule. Protection gives them a defined path to full reimbursement, a different and more complete resolution than a credit policy offers.
Does refund protection actually prevent chargebacks, or just reduce them?
It prevents them, and the reason is pretty simple. Guests file chargebacks when they have no other option. When a guest who can’t attend has a clear, easy path to a refund, they take it. Across the accesso client network over the past year, Teak managed 9,400 refund requests and paid out $1.1M to guests. Not one of those resolutions generated a chargeback. Give guests a better option and most of them will use it.
Ready to take a closer look?
If you’re an existing accesso client and want to discuss how refund protection fits into your current checkout flow or advance purchase strategy, reach out directly to [email protected]. Not an accesso client? Contact Teak for a personalized demo.