Deposits and refunds, agreed before you transfer anything

This guide covers travel, process and cost. It contains no clinical advice.

A deposit is a normal way to hold surgical time that the clinic cannot resell at short notice, and asking for one is not a warning sign. What matters is the sequence and the terms: a deposit should follow a written treatment plan, not precede it; it should be a modest share of the total rather than most of it; and four things should be agreed in writing before it moves — what it holds, what happens if you cancel, what happens if the clinic reschedules, and what happens if the plan changes after the scan.

The order things should happen in

Where a clinic asks for money before the plan, ask why, politely and once. There are legitimate answers — a small assessment fee credited against treatment is common and reasonable. What is not reasonable is a substantial payment against a treatment nobody has yet described in writing.

The four clauses, with the wording to send

The fourth is the one people forget and the one most likely to bite. Imaging routinely reveals that grafting is needed, and that changes the price. You want the right to reconsider at that moment without losing what you have already paid — and a clinic confident in its pricing will grant it, because it rarely gets used.

How you pay decides what you can do later

This is settled at the moment of payment and cannot be changed afterwards. Card payments carry protections that bank transfers do not; a transfer to a personal account rather than a business one carries almost none and is worth questioning on its own. Ask for an invoice with the clinic's registered name and number on it, for every payment, including the deposit.

None of this is adversarial, and it should not feel like it. You are agreeing terms for a service that will run over months across a border — the same thing anyone would do before a kitchen refit, and this costs about the same and lasts longer.