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Direct cancellation policies

How to configure the cancellation policy manager to match your business

Andrew Schorr avatar
Written by Andrew Schorr
Updated over 2 months ago

By default, Direct bookings have a non-refundable cancellation policy. You can configure custom policies and associate them to properties using our booking policy manager that will let you choose how flexible you would like your policy to be. See: Managing Direct booking policies.

If a guest requests a cancellation, the amount to refund will be calculated according to the applicable cancellation policy at the time of the booking. See: How to cancel a booking. If you ever want to be more generous than your policy, you can use the Send or request money feature to send an ad hoc refund of any amount to the guest.

Partial versus full refunds

If a booking is 100% refundable, Hospitable refunds the exact amount the guest paid, including the guest service fee. For Direct Basic users, note that you will still pay Stripe for the payment processing fees on the original reservation, so a 100% refund will end up costing you money. For Direct Premium, the payment processing fees are covered by the service fee.

For rules that offer a partial refund, Hospitable will regardless refund 100% of any cleaning and linen fees, including taxes. We then apply the applicable refund percentage on the nightly rate, fees included in the nightly rate (resort, management, and community fees), and the guest service fee, if applicable. The remaining balance is your non-refundable cancellation fee, which is taxable in some jurisdictions. Hospitable will calculate and retain any taxes on the cancellation fee, and refund any remaining taxes collected on the original booking.

Editing cancellation policies

We provide you a set of four templates to get started: Non-refundable, Strict, Balanced, and Easy. You may edit those existing rule sets, or add your own policy from scratch. Reservations take the policy that was active when the booking was made. If you make changes to your cancellation policy, this will only impact future bookings.

After booking rules

You may choose to offer guests a 100% refund of their booking within 24- or 48-hours of the booking request being accepted by the host.

You can set an additional condition on this rule if you don't want to honor it on last-minute reservations. If you set this value to 0 days, that means you will always honor the rule, even for last-minute bookings. Keep in mind that all cancellation rules expire at the check-in time of the reservation.

Before check-in rules

You may set multiple rules that offer any percentage up to a 100% refund based on the number of days in advance of the check-in. Once the time period for your last rule has passed, the reservation becomes non-refundable.

Apply your rule to your properties

All properties must have a cancellation policy at all times. To change your default policy, set the policy you want to become your new default policy as the default. You can override the default policy by assigning a different policy to individual properties.

See also

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