When your student cancels or reschedules a lesson with less than twenty-four hours notice, they pay for the lesson. You get paid — even though you didn’t teach.

We enforce that policy to protect your time and your income.

We expect the same level of professionalism from you. When you make a late change to a student’s lesson, there are real consequences — even when the student seems perfectly fine with it.

Here’s what actually happens when you make a change inside the 24-hour window:

The student has already been billed. Stripe charges Tunelark a processing fee on every transaction. If the lesson doesn’t happen and we need to process a refund, Tunelark absorbs that fee. That cost comes out of our side — not yours.

Lesson reminders have already gone out or are about to go out, which creates confusion for the student and sometimes generates unnecessary support tickets.

Even if you and your student verbally agreed during today’s lesson that next week’s lesson isn’t happening, the dashboard change still needs to happen promptly — before billing and reminders are triggered. A verbal agreement between you and your student does not stop the system from running. Only a dashboard update does.

And handling it via text, phone call, or email instead of the dashboard doesn’t count. The dashboard is the system of record.

You should also know that the support team is notified every time a teacher cancels or reschedules a lesson late. Every incident is tracked. A pattern of late changes will impact your eligibility to appear on Find-a-Teacher and receive new students.

Late changes also have a direct impact on whether your students stay with you. Teachers who make frequent late changes to their schedules experience significantly more student loss.

And consider this: you set the tone for the relationship. If you cancel late, your student learns that late cancellations are normal — and they’ll start doing it to you.

Consistency and reliability are the foundation of keeping your students.

Here’s what to do:

Make all lesson changes in your dashboard as early as possible. Never wait until the last minute, even if you’ve already spoken to the student about it.

If a student reaches out to you about a change — by text, call, or email — direct them to make the change in their own Tunelark dashboard. Students have full scheduling tools available to them.

The one exception: If a student contacts you about a genuine emergency and qualifies for lesson fee forgiveness, you should process that cancellation or reschedule request in your dashboard and select “Do not charge.” This is the only situation where you handle a student-initiated scheduling change on their behalf. If no emergency has occurred, refer the student back to their dashboard.

If you do need to cancel late on a student due to a genuine emergency on your end, process it in your dashboard before the end of the booked lesson time and select “Do not charge” if appropriate.

And consider this: if you’ve caused a late cancellation on a student, offering at least thirty minutes of free lesson time on their next lesson is a meaningful way to show you value their time — the same way they would pay you for a full lesson if they canceled late on you.