"We were also disappointed to pull out however our main Spanish speaking technical resource is very unwell making it impossible for us to attend. We will reach out again to discuss how we can work together, as this is not personal and we love what you do. Good luck with the event!"
This seems pretty naive in terms of DevRel. Seems like they view the sponsorship as a paid talk slot. Which of course can be fine and no one would be the wiser as long as you don't pull out if your speaker suddenly becomes unavailable.
Yeah, that may shoot down my "good intentions" theory.
According to the event's sponsorship page (linked elsewhere in the comments here), the speaking slot was 1500€ on top of the 990-4500€ "base". We can assume that they didn't get the "prepayment" discount since if they had already paid, this wouldn't be an issue.
What's still unclear is whether they are pulling out of the speaker slot only, or the entire sponsorship. Regardless, Couchbase shouldn't be withholding those funds just because their employee is unwell. They are essentially saying that they were planning on paying for that, but now they won't since they can't attend. That falls on them and is not the fault of T3chfest. They should still be expected to pay up.
And maybe they plan to? Maybe this is just a misunderstanding between parties where Couchbase told T3chfest that they wouldn't be able to send the speaker, but in the confusion someone took that to mean they wouldn't be paying for it either, when that wasn't stated?
Again, don't know, so I'm not going to jump to assumptions other than to say that, based on the response, I would expect (and hope) that Couchbase would still pay the sponsorship fees that they (clearly) committed to.
"We were also disappointed to pull out however our main Spanish speaking technical resource is very unwell making it impossible for us to attend. We will reach out again to discuss how we can work together, as this is not personal and we love what you do. Good luck with the event!"
This seems pretty naive in terms of DevRel. Seems like they view the sponsorship as a paid talk slot. Which of course can be fine and no one would be the wiser as long as you don't pull out if your speaker suddenly becomes unavailable.