Force Majeure Clause: How Planners Protect a Deposit Before Signing

August 3, 2026 · The Retreat Register

You found the lodge. The team loved the photos. You signed, wired the deposit and stopped thinking about the contract.

Eight weeks later a storm takes out the only road up the mountain, and you are reading page four of a PDF at eleven at night looking for a paragraph you skipped.

That paragraph has a name. It is the force majeure clause, and it is the part of the contract that decides who absorbs the loss when something outside anyone’s control stops the event from happening. This page explains what is usually in one and which sentences are worth asking to change before you sign.

What force majeure actually means

The phrase is French for superior force. In a contract it does one job: it names a set of events that excuse a party from performing without that failure counting as a breach.

It works as a list plus a test.

The clearest public example of what such a list contains sits in the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the rulebook for contracts with the United States government. Its excusable delays clause reads: “Except for defaults of subcontractors at any tier, the Contractor shall not be in default because of any failure to perform this contract under its terms if the failure arises from causes beyond the control and without the fault or negligence of the Contractor. Examples of these causes are (1) acts of God or of the public enemy, (2) acts of the Government in either its sovereign or contractual capacity, (3) fires, (4) floods, (5) epidemics, (6) quarantine restrictions, (7) strikes, (8) freight embargoes, and (9) unusually severe weather.”¹

The list is ordinary, and epidemics and quarantine restrictions have been on it since the clause was first written.¹

Now the limit, which matters more than the list. The Federal Acquisition Regulation governs contracts with the federal government. It does not govern your contract with a lodge in Vermont. Nothing in it entitles anyone to cancel a retreat. It is useful as an illustration of what the standard list looks like, because private venue contracts usually name similar events, and because reading it costs nothing.

The same clause carries the test that travels with the list: “In each instance, the failure to perform must be beyond the control and without the fault or negligence of the Contractor.”¹ Both halves have to be true: beyond your control, and not your fault.

What is not force majeure

Your team’s numbers came in low. Finance cut the budget. Two executives can no longer make the dates. A better offer arrived from another property. A key speaker pulled out. None of these are force majeure anywhere, under any list. They are ordinary business changes, and they belong to a completely different paragraph of your contract.

That paragraph is the cancellation clause, and it is usually a schedule of what percentage of the contract value you owe depending on how many days out you pull the plug. Force majeure and cancellation are two separate mechanisms in the same document. Confusing them is an easy mistake, and it usually happens at the worst moment.

Read both. They are frequently on different pages.

Four questions to ask of the clause in front of you

1. What events are named, and is the list closed?

Look at how the list ends. Wording like “including but not limited to” leaves room for an event nobody thought of. A closed list that stops at the last semicolon means anything unnamed is not covered, however obviously it should be. Ask which one you are looking at.

Check specifically for weather. If the clause names hurricanes and floods, look for snow and road closures as well.

2. What does triggering it do?

This decides how much money you see again. Being excused from a contract is not the same as being refunded under it. A clause can produce any of these:

• A full refund of everything paid.
• A refund of everything except the deposit.
• A credit toward a future stay, sometimes with an expiry date on it.
• An obligation to reschedule inside a stated window, at the venue’s discretion or at yours.
• Nothing at all beyond both sides walking away from what is left unpaid.

If your clause does not say, ask the venue to write it in before you sign.

3. Does it work in both directions?

Read who the clause protects. Plenty are drafted so that the venue is excused when something goes wrong and the group is not. Ask what happens if the venue is the one that cannot perform, whether from a closure, a fire, a staffing collapse, or a double booking. Ask what it owes you in that case beyond returning your money, such as help finding an alternative and cover for any difference in rate.

4. How high is the bar?

The words differ and the difference is real. A clause that triggers only when performance becomes “impossible” is much narrower than one that triggers when it becomes “impracticable”, which is narrower again than one that triggers when travel becomes “inadvisable” or when a government body issues a warning. Find the word. It is doing more work than the list of events above it.

Words to search for before you sign

Open the PDF and search for each of these words.

• force majeure: the clause itself, which is sometimes titled “impossibility”, “excusable delay”, or “events beyond control” instead
• cancel: the separate money schedule described above
• attrition: what you owe if fewer people show up than you contracted for
• minimum: food and beverage minimums, which survive a shrunken headcount
• non-refundable: usually attached to the deposit, sometimes to more than that
• credit: the word that turns a refund into a voucher
• notice: how many days of warning either side has to give, and in what form
• written: whether an email counts as notice, or whether they want a letter
• reschedule: the window, and who chooses the new date
• sole discretion: worth reading every time it appears, whoever it belongs to

What to ask for, before the pen moves

Requests worth making:

• Add the weather events that are realistic for that location, named plainly, including road closure preventing access to the property.
• Make the clause mutual in wording, so it protects both sides by the same terms.
• Replace a credit with a refund of amounts paid, or at minimum strip the expiry date off the credit.
• Set a notice period both sides can actually meet, and say that email counts.
• Add a partial-performance line covering the case where the event can go ahead but at a fraction of the size.

Put the requests in one email, numbered, before you sign anything. Every one of them is cheaper to ask for now than to argue for later.

Group pricing in this industry is quote-only by default. A venue that does not publish a rate writes each deal on its own, and a document written that way can be edited the same way. Treat the paragraph in front of you as a first draft.

This page describes what these documents usually say and what to ask about. It is planning information, not legal advice. For a contract large enough to hurt, the clause is worth ten minutes of a lawyer’s time before you sign rather than after.

Have you read: How to find the hidden costs before they land on your invoice

Based on The Retreat Register internal venue dataset as of August 3, 2026. How the register is built: the methodology.