Rainy Moon Bounce Weekends
Every time the weather forecast is predicting a wet weekend, us people in the moon bounce business cross our fingers and hope that the weather team is wrong. Sometimes they are (more often than not actually), but sometimes they are right on. The guessing game between rain or no rain from the weather gurus leaves most customers on the fence as to whether or not they should have their party. What do you do when the forecast predicts a 50% chance of rain? It is a tough decision because on one end the rental can be expensive, but on the other your child is hoping to have their birthday party. A bad weather forecast does lead to cancellations on our end, but believe it or not, most people still prefer to have their party. This is why we never cancel parties because of rain in the forecast and leave it up to our customer instead.
Delivering moon bounces, waterslides and other inflatable rentals in the rain has its fair share of complications. First off, when we set up the bounce house it tends to get soaked if it is raining at the time of set up. Yes, we would love to be able to wait out the rain with you and put it up after the rain, but unfortunately if we do that, we fail to make it to our other parties. This does not make us any friends and often times puts our drivers in particularly awkward situations with the customer. Our office staff tends to be on the phone all day on rainy days trying to work with customers through their frustrations and any rain related questions. Only if we could stop the rain!
The real difficulty for us comes when it is time to pick up the moon bounces and dealing with any fallout from the rainy day. A normal moon bounce will weigh about 250 lbs when it is dry. After a day of rain, they can sometimes double in weight. This leads us to get delayed on all of our pickups at the end of the day. Rather than getting back to the shop at around 10, some drivers will get back well after midnight. The fallout from this tends to be very tired drivers and frustrated customers over us not picking up on time. We are very sorry for the delays, but unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it on rainy days. Believe me, our team has a much tougher day when it rains. We also pray for sun!
This seems like a good time to review our cancellation policy for all moon bounce and other inflatable rentals. Astro Jump of Metro DC will deliver rain or shine like I mentioned earlier. If you choose to cancel because of impending bad weather or any other reason, you must do so by 12:00 p.m. the day before your rental. As long as you cancel or reschedule before then, you are entitled to a full refund. We begin to incur costs at that time, so we make it as late of a cancellation as possible. If you cancel after that time, we offer you the chance to roll your event over to another day sometime this calendar year. Even though we have started incurring costs at this point, we do this as a courtesy to you because ultimately we want your business. If you do not cancel ahead of time and we show up at your house, the full amount of the rental is due. We try to make our cancellation policy as fair as possible. Our goal is to help you plan and execute the party of you choice and not to profit from your misfortune.