A camp operator kept a six-figure deposit and called it a formality

The situation

The email from Andrei arrived on a Friday afternoon, three lines long. The camp would not be refunding any portion of the deposit for the cancelled weeks, he wrote, because the booking agreement said cancellations forfeited the full amount paid, regardless of notice given or whether the spots were later filled by other families. That was the move that eventually brought the file to us, though not right away, and not before Brandon had already spent several weeks trying to argue his own way out of it.

Brandon is a sales director and, together with Cameron, a co-owner of a mid-size Parry Sound company that had built a summer camp benefit into its employee package for several years. Cameron, a physiotherapist by training, had championed the benefit originally as a way to support staff with young families, and it had become one of the company's more visible perks. Each spring the company block-booked a set number of overnight camp weeks for staff families at a fixed price, paying a substantial deposit up front to secure the spots for the coming season across a multi-summer arrangement negotiated directly with Andrei. It was popular with staff and, until this year, entirely uneventful.

That year, a slower sales quarter meant fewer employees wanted to commit to the full camp schedule, and Brandon, trying to manage costs responsibly on behalf of the business, notified the camp roughly two months before the season that the company was reducing its block booking by about a third. He expected some kind of partial forfeiture, reasonable given the late notice, and was prepared to absorb that as a cost of the cutback. What he was not prepared for was Andrei's position that the entire deposit, north of half a million dollars across the full multi-summer arrangement, was forfeit regardless of how many of the cancelled spots the camp went on to sell to other families that same season.

Brandon tried to resolve it directly for several weeks, exchanging emails with Andrei that grew increasingly pointed on both sides, before concluding the disagreement was not going to move without outside help. He had assumed, reasonably enough for someone without a legal background, that a calm, direct conversation between two businesspeople would settle a dispute like this. By the time he came to us, some of what he had already written to Andrei needed to be accounted for, not just the underlying dispute itself.

Where it went wrong

Brandon's instinct to try resolving the matter himself before involving a lawyer is a common one, and often the right instinct for a smaller dispute. Here, it created a real complication. In his early emails to Andrei, frustrated and trying to find common ground, Brandon had written more than once that the company understood cancellations meant losing the deposit and was only asking the camp to be reasonable about it as a gesture of goodwill, rather than as a matter the company believed it had a legal right to press.

That language, sent informally and in good faith, was not fatal to the company's position, but it was not helpful either. A statement that a party understood the deposit would be lost reads, out of context, like an acknowledgment that the forfeiture clause was fair and enforceable as written. Andrei's side later pointed to exactly that language when we opened settlement discussions, arguing Brandon had already conceded the point before a lawyer was ever involved, and suggesting there was little left to negotiate beyond the camp's own sense of goodwill.

The stronger argument available to the company had nothing to do with whether the parties had once used the word forfeit in an email. It turned on a distinction the law draws between a genuine pre-estimate of the loss a cancellation actually causes, which a contract can validly require a party to pay, and a penalty designed simply to punish cancellation regardless of the real cost involved, which courts will generally not enforce as written even where the parties agreed to it. The camp's clause took the full deposit no matter how far in advance notice was given and no matter whether the cancelled spots were resold, which pointed toward a penalty rather than a real cost estimate tied to any actual, demonstrable loss.

Working around Brandon's earlier emails meant reframing the company's position carefully: the goodwill language reflected an assumption made without legal advice about what the clause required, not a considered acknowledgment that the clause was fair or that its terms were beyond challenge. That distinction mattered a great deal once negotiations resumed, and it had to be established clearly before any new figures could credibly be put on the table.

There was also a question of what Andrei's camp had actually done with the cancelled spots. If the camp had simply absorbed the reduction and lost real revenue as a result, the case for enforcing the full forfeiture would have been considerably stronger. Whether that was true or not was something Brandon, negotiating alone, had never actually asked to see documented.

What we did

1. Reviewed the full booking agreement and the camp's actual costs. We requested documentation of how many of the cancelled spots the camp had gone on to resell, and at what price, since a clause that keeps the full deposit even after spots are resold to other families is much harder to defend as a genuine estimate of loss rather than a penalty designed to punish the cancellation itself.
2. Assessed the exposure created by Brandon's earlier emails. Before making any new arguments, we reviewed every message Brandon had exchanged with Andrei to understand exactly what had been said, so we would not be caught off guard if the camp's side raised the goodwill language in negotiation or in a filed response later in the file. We flagged the specific phrases that could be read as a concession and prepared, in advance, the plain explanation of why they reflected an assumption made without legal advice rather than a considered agreement.
3. Reframed the company's position around the resale evidence. Rather than disputing whether a deposit could ever be forfeited, which the earlier emails had already conceded in substance, we focused the argument narrowly on the mismatch between the full forfeiture and the camp's demonstrably smaller actual loss once resold spots were accounted for and subtracted from the total claimed. That narrower framing also sidestepped any need to argue the goodwill language away outright, since it simply was not relevant to a dispute about the size of the camp's real loss.
4. Sent a formal demand distinguishing genuine cost from penalty. The letter set out the legal distinction plainly, attached the resale figures we had obtained through the request for documentation, and proposed a partial refund calculated against the camp's real shortfall rather than the full deposit amount, giving Andrei's side a concrete number to respond to instead of a general grievance.
5. Prepared the file for a claim while continuing to negotiate. We assembled the documentary record needed to support a claim challenging the clause as an unenforceable penalty, so the company would not lose leverage in negotiations by appearing unwilling or unprepared to pursue the matter further if talks stalled again. That preparation included drafting the claim in outline form, so Andrei's side could see the company was ready to file, not just threatening to.
6. Held firm through two rounds of camp counteroffers. The camp's first two responses offered only token refunds well below the resale-based figure we had proposed. We rejected both in writing, restating the underlying legal argument each time and reattaching the resale figures, which kept pressure on the camp to engage with the actual numbers rather than a fixed policy position.
7. Brought in an independent estimate of the camp's typical operating margin. To strengthen the argument that the full forfeiture bore no relation to real loss, we obtained a general industry comparison showing how a resold seasonal spot typically affects an operator's bottom line, giving the mismatch argument an independent basis beyond Brandon's own booking figures. This mattered because Andrei's side could dismiss Brandon's own numbers as self-interested, but had a harder time dismissing an outside industry benchmark.
8. Negotiated a final settlement figure with Brandon's sign-off. Once the camp's counsel engaged substantively with the resale evidence, we worked through several rounds of figures with Brandon to reach a number that reflected the camp's genuine loss, closing the file without the cost and delay of proceeding to a hearing over a claim already grounded in solid documentation. We reviewed each proposed figure against the resale evidence before presenting it to Brandon, so he was never asked to accept a number without understanding exactly what it was based on.

The outcome

The camp agreed to return most of the disputed deposit, retaining an amount that corresponded to its actual, demonstrable loss on the spots that were not resold before the season began. The final recovery landed well above the token amounts initially offered and close to what the resale evidence supported as a fair outcome, once Andrei's side had engaged seriously with the numbers rather than the original blanket forfeiture position.

The settlement was not a full recovery of the original deposit, and it was not going to be, given Brandon's early emails and the genuine cost the camp had incurred on the portion of spots it never managed to resell before the season began. Part of the value in the file was in containing the damage those emails could have done, rather than achieving a theoretical best-case result that the earlier correspondence had already made considerably less likely.

For Brandon and Cameron's company, the outcome restored most of a significant six-figure sum to the business without a hearing, but the more lasting lesson was about timing. Every week that passed before the file came to us was another week of informal correspondence that could be read against the company later, and every one of those weeks had already been spent by the time Andrei's first refusal arrived. Handling a large commercial dispute alone for as long as Brandon did was, in this instance, the most expensive part of the file.

Cameron, reviewing the final numbers afterward, noted that the company's summer camp benefit would likely continue with a different operator going forward, and that the multi-summer booking structure itself, not just this particular cancellation clause, would get a harder look with legal advice built in from the start next time, rather than after a dispute had already begun to unfold on its own terms.

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