I apologize if this has been suggested before, but was talking with my wife and I thought her suggestion was a good one. I’m not sure if any of you will or if Ironman will….
I get why they have the rule in place about deferrals and largely makes sense to me as it relates to permits, costs, financial promises to towns as well as dealing with first timers who don’t train properly and want to bail. And other stuff etc.
A friend who has done many Ironmans and will continue to, picked up his first injury in all these years and is frustrated as all get out that he didnt buy in for Flex 90. He didnt buy in early enough because you know sometimes its hard to plan out 10-12 months in advance.
The key point being that he has done many IM races before. Would it make sense for Ironman to consider allowing someone who has done X number of IM races to defer a race to the following year even if they didn’t buy into flex 90 in time? It could still be limited to 1 deferral for that race or 1 deferral per year even if you are signed up for 3-4 races or 1 deferral for so many previous races within that distance. So of they have a 70.3 a few weeks before a full and thier injury will keep them out of both, they could possibly defer both.
Kind of like a customer loyalty program which lots of businesses have.
Lots of other aspects about IM/this topic not mentioned here cause I didnt want to write a novel, but curious about people’s thoughts.
From their perspective he’s a long term customer that is unlikely to stop entering races and so no benefit to them. They know 15% of entrants end up DNS so they oversell those entries at races that fill up. If they did end up doing more deferrals then the entry price would just go up for all to offset it. Only way that a change to the deferral system makes sense is if you can show that it would make Ironman more money by increasing regstrations > cost of deferals.
Yeah, I don’t know the “cost” of each deferral and I also don’t know the data on how many deferrals per year/race. But I would imagine the number of this type of deferrals would be relatively small each year/race because of the criteria. Of course, I could be wrong. Is this really any different than Flex 90 in terms of the cost of the deferral?
I’m outside of my lane here in terms of familiarity with customer loyalty programs, but there is at least a small cost to each company who has one, so is the cost of this X number of deferrals small enough to create/implement? Could a small processing fee/charge help offset some of year 20xx lost dollars?
But to your point, until there is a legitimate competitor to IM, they hold all the cards and dont seem to care too much about their repeat customer business experience.
As a producer of a couple of small races (hobby not vocation) I can tell you that once you open the floodgates it just keeps flowing. We do offer registration insurance through USA triathlon, but we have had to take a hard line with deferrals, transfers, etc. I can also vouch for the fact that the financial difficulties of putting on races is pretty hard. Now, I understand, Ironman is a different animal but having put on races it amazes me every time how well they do the logistics, as well as making the events financially viable. Ironman has always treated me fairly in maybe close to 100ish events, but I have never had to ask for a refund or deferral.
Yep, huge undertaking and again I do understand why they do what they do. A tweak could make things better for their repeat customers and I guess I don’t see how this would be hugely different from the Flex 90. But, I dont have the data and I am making a positive presumption from the consumer side. Flood gates could happen, but a clear policy strictly enforced would mitigate and we know IM is good at strict enforcement.
Flex 90 is there to provide the money (entrance fees) to cover the costs incurred by the promoter 6+ months ahead of the race. So the reason they have some deferral there (athlete benefit) is to help the early cashflow (Promoter benefit). So if deferral was made much easier for non early registrations, then aside from races that sell out, why would anyone enter early? Certainly not to save $50 on a $1000 race.
I gave a (conservative) figure above and you can see that if you look at the startlists/entrance lists. It’s a lot more than most people think. If I include all races I’ve entered (ie include all tris, running races) then I reckon I’ll be close to 20% DNS.
Yeah, that upfront cash is huge and I know that. And in thinking about it, multi time IM racers likely stay in shape year round and could easily sign up for any race last “minute” if they so choose, assuming its not sold out. But assuming those folks wouldnt need a deferral. But then you get into how late is too late (for signup date) for asking for a deferral from the repeat customers and then you just have to go, well now you just have flex 90 but well past the 90 days. Likely confusing and more to manage/track, but not impossible.
I’m still gonna stay on the consumer side and say some type of loyalty program (kinds like their Legacy program) could work here, but thats cause i dont work for the promoter side. Despite being old, still naive and filled with hopium and its easy to arm chair quarterback.