Scheduling a Retreat
If you would like to discuss a retreat, use our Contact Form to initiate contact with us, or call us at 707-536-5781. We will get back to you as soon as possible by phone or email. We will be happy to answer any questions you have and discuss with you whether our retreat is appropriate for you. If a retreat does fit your situation, goals, and needs, and you want to do a retreat, we can also discuss available dates that fit your schedule.
Meanwhile here are a number of frequently asked questions we answer:
We offer two different types of retreats: a Private Retreat where just you and your partner work with John, and a Group Retreat that you share with other couples. See the dates that are currently avaialble for both kinds of retreats on our Retreat Calendar.
To secure a retreat, submit payment using the following links, depending on which type of retreat you wish to attend:
Cancellations or Rescheduling of Retreats
When you sign up and pay for a retreat you must explicitly agree (by clicking on a checkbox) to our no-refund policy. Unless that box gets physically checked, payment can not be made. Immediately above this box the payment page specifically states our policy is that “payments are non-refundable, with rare exception.” A link is then given to see this Policies & Information page to view all the details as set out below.
Essentially our no-refund policy is to prevent you from making a payment to secure a retreat until you are fully committed and certain you will attend. We have to do this because our business model is vastly different from familiar types of service businesses (like medical, dental, therapy, hotels) regarding deposits and refunds.
Unlike those types of service businesses, specific parameters of our business model severely constrain our ability to offer refunds.
When you secure your dates for a retreat by making a payment, we turn away others. Given the small number of time slots we have to offer, and the time-sensitive scheduling needs couples have, this means we lose business from the couples we turn away after you reserve your time slot. We also lose the chance to help a couple who would have honored their commitment to attend on the dates we instead committed to you.
Therefore, due to the scope of the number of days we commit to you when you reserve a retreat, and that we do turn away other couples who may have wanted those dates, your payment will be non-refundable, with rare exception.
So please be certain you will attend before you make a payment. Do not use a payment to temporarily hold dates. Do not place a payment if you are not certain your partner will attend. If you have any doubts or concerns about any of this, discuss these with us before you make a payment.
In summary, we have a strict policy that all payments are non-refundable if you later want to cancel or reschedule a retreat. That said, the following considerations may be given at our discretion if we get sufficient advance notice and we are able to find another couple to sign up for your reserved dates. In that event, we may refund 50% of your payment if you cancel, or credit your full payment toward a rescheduled retreat, if another couple takes your place on the dates you scheduled.
Shipping Books
Within the United States:
We ship via Priority Mail with the United States Postal Service. We do this in order to give you the best possible price on shipping and handling charges. All shipments are placed securely in extra strong boxes. Most orders are shipped within 48 hours and arrive within 3-5 business days thereafter to addresses within the U.S.
Outside the United States:
If you live outside the US and want to order a publication to be shipped to you, please read the following carefully. We infrequently ship printed books to destinations outside the US. It requires us to go to extra steps at the Post Office, such as filling out customs forms, getting in line, and having special shipping materials. We do this because we do want to make our publications available to anyone anywhere who wants them. However, recent changes in costs of shipping force us to make what will seem like a very unfair purchase policy.
Here’s the main issue for you to consider. There is a small chance that your order could be lost in the mail. The only way we currently ship is using the US Postal Service, which hands off the package to your own postal system to deliver to you. Also, there’s a step whereby the package needs to clear your Customs. We are offered no way of either tracking or insuring an international order through our Postal System. In ten years we have had only two packages lost. But since we are a small business and not a big company, we cannot afford to carry the risk if your package gets lost in the mail or in your Customs clearance process. We especially cannot afford to take that risk in view of steep increases in US Postal shipping costs.
So, in the unlikely case that your shipment is lost, we cannot refund your money. We ask you to agree to these conditions before you can place the order with us. Given these unusually stringent policies, do consider that you can get any of our publications as a less expensive download to your computer.
Returns and Replacements of Books
Computer Downloads and e-Books:
100% Money Back Guarantee: If for any reason you wish to have a refund on e-Books or electronic downloads like the Relationship Advisor, just ask for a refund. Go ahead and read our e-Book(s) entirely and/or use the Relationship Advisor, and try the strategies and suggestions in these entirely risk free for a couple of months. If the strategies and information you get aren’t helpful to you we’ll refund your money.
Printed Publications:
Unfortunately we are not set up to take returns on physical products we ship to you. So for printed books, card sets and other publications we must consider all sales final. We have put our publications online for you to freely play with or read, so that you can “try before you buy.” We are sorry if you feel the desire to return your product purchase.
In the unlikely event that there is a defect or damage to your product, either from shipping or manufacturing, we will gladly replace it. Just send the product back to the return address on the package or invoice. When we get it, we’ll automatically send you a new replacement.
Once in a great while, a single card might be missing from one of our decks, due to the manufacturing process. Instead of sending the whole product back, just contact us and we will send you any cards you may be missing.
Our Privacy Policies
What will we do with your information?
Regarding any information you give us, from your name and email address, to anything else, we will respect your privacy. Information you give us will not be shared or sold to third parties for marketing purposes.
What about my email address if I contact you?
We do not give that information out to any other party. We use it to send you the information, newsletters, advice, or other matters you are requesting. Any newsletters we send out carry links to unsubscribe and remove your email address from our list.
What is our use of cookies?
We have not directly programmed the use of cookies into our site in order to capture, store or sell any information about you whatsoever. If you disable cookies we do not believe that will impact your ability to navigate or use our site in any way.
The WordPress platform that we built our site upon generates cookies to track comments to blog posts. We do not use or interact with these in any way. We do not even use comments as a part of our functionality. However, we have not been able to eliminate the existence of cookies in the deep code of WordPress. Consider them inert.
Also the webmaster tool Google Analytics generates cookies to provide information for how users interact with our website content. We view such information on a generic user basis only. For example, we look at how many users who land on our relationship resources page jump next to our relationship quiz versus how many jump next to a love advice post versus how many jump off our site. We use this general information only to improve our site, not to track anyone individually.