Edinburgh International Festival is committed to providing a high-quality experience for everyone. In order to do this, we need you to tell us when we get things wrong. We want to help you resolve your complaint as quickly as possible.

We treat as a complaint any expression of dissatisfaction with our service which calls for a response. We listen to your complaints, treat them seriously, and learn from them so that we can continuously improve.

Reasonable adjustments

Our aim is to make our complaints policy easy to use and accessible for everyone. We will take steps to make any reasonable adjustments needed to access this policy, or any requests to provide responses in other formats.

If you experience any barriers in accessing this written policy, or in reporting a complaint in writing, please call us on: 0131 473 2099 and we will be happy to discuss alternative formats that are accessible to you.

Stage 1: Informal Complaint

When issues are simple and we have done something wrong, we may not need a formal investigation. We can say sorry, try to put things right and/ or learn from our mistake. Where this is an option, we will do this promptly within 10 working days.

Any member of staff can deal with a complaint informally (including the person being complained about) and offer an on-the-spot apology. If the complaint is simple but the person who received the complaint cannot handle it because they are unfamiliar with the issue, they will pass it on to someone who can as soon as possible.

Alternatively, you can email [email protected]

Examples of informal complaints:

• We are late replying to you or you haven’t received a response
• You are unhappy with something a member of our staff said and they agree they could have said it in a better way

If we apologise on the phone or in person, we won’t usually follow up with an email. If you are still not happy or we don’t feel that the complaint is easily dealt with informally, you can make a formal complaint using Stage 2 of our complaints procedure.

Stage 2: Formal complaint

You can make a formal complaint in a few ways:

by e-mail: [email protected]

or by post to:

Edinburgh International Festival
The Hub
Castlehill
Edinburgh
EH1 2NE

When making a complaint please include:

• Your name and address (or email address)
• What your complaint is about

Examples of a formal complaint:

• You believe we did not provide the service you paid for
• The actions of an EIF representative caused you a major inconvenience (e.g. a festival driver parked in an inappropriate place)
  
  

Please try to be as clear as possible. This will help us understand your complaint and respond to you promptly. If a complaint is unclear, we may ask you for more information to help us understand. If you do not provide the information we need when asked, we may not be able to help you.

Timescales

If you want to make a formal complaint, then you should do so within three months of the matter you wish to complain about. Waiting longer could make it difficult to look at your complaint and mean we aren’t able to unless there are exceptional circumstances.

We aim to send a full response within 20 working days of receiving your complaint. If we need to contact you for further information the 20 days will start from the date we get the information we need. If we are not able to meet this deadline, we will tell you and let you know when we are likely to be able to respond to your complaint.

Investigation

We will decide which member of staff will look at your complaint in more detail. Complaints about the service being provided by a member of staff or team will usually be dealt with by the relevant manager. Our CEO, Festival Director and Chair will not respond to your complaint personally, even if you write to them directly. They have delegated the responsibility for handling complaints in line with this policy.