Cancellation policies: set up and enforce

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Why	Set clear refund rules — flexible, strict, non-refundable — and answer a guest’s cancellation question quickly when they call.
Who	Administrators who set up rate plans and take guest calls.
What you’ll get	A list of cancellation policies, links to your rate plans, overrides for specific dates like holidays — and you know where the guest sees the terms and where the booking snapshot lives.
Limitations	The policy is snapshotted into the booking when the booking is created; how a channel enforces it on its own sales is the channel’s logic — no guarantees.

A cancellation policy defines the refund rules for a canceled booking: how many days before the check-in date a guest can cancel for free, and what penalty applies after that. Policies are attached to rate plans, so the same rate plan can be sold on different cancellation terms — from flexible to non-refundable. How rate plans work overall is covered in Rate plans: how they work; this article is only about cancellation.

How a policy works

A policy is built from three parts:

“Penalty type” — what is charged when the guest cancels after the free window.
“Penalty percentage” — the charge as a percentage of the total stay cost.
“Free cancellation (days)” — how many days before the check-in date a cancellation is free of charge.

Policies live apart from rate plans — as a list on the “Cancellation policies” tab of the “Rate plans” screen — and are reusable: one policy can be attached to several rate plans.

The “Penalty type” options: “No penalty” — no charge for canceling; “Percentage of the total” — the percentage from the “Penalty percentage” field applies; “First night”; “First night + percentage”; “Fixed amount”; “Full cost”; “Non-refundable (prepayment)” — the booking is paid upfront and cancellation brings no money back; “Non-refundable (pay at check-in)” — also non-refundable, but the payment is taken at check-in; “Custom” — you spell out the terms yourself.

Two opposite examples. A flexible policy is “Percentage of the total” at 100% with free cancellation 2 days ahead: before the deadline the guest cancels for free, after it the full cost of the stay is charged. A strict one is “Non-refundable (prepayment)”: the guest pays when booking, and canceling does not bring the money back.

Create a policy

Open “Rates” in the left menu — the “Rate plans” screen opens.
Switch to the “Cancellation policies” tab — the list of your existing policies.
Press “Policy”.
Enter the “Name” and pick the “Penalty type” — “No penalty” is the default. For the percentage type, fill in “Penalty percentage” and “Free cancellation (days)”.
Fill in the “Policy text” — this is what the guest sees — and the “Description”, a note for your team.
Check the “Preview”: the system assembles a human-readable text from the fields, for example: “Free cancellation no later than 2 days before the check-in date. For later cancellations a penalty of 100.00% of the total stay cost applies.”
Save.

Result: the policy is created but does nothing yet — until it is attached to a rate plan, nobody will see it.

Attach it to a rate plan

On the “Rates” tab, open the card of the rate plan you need.
Switch to the “Cancellation policies” tab in the card.
In the “Default policy” field, pick a policy — the caption explains: “Applies when there is no active override”.
Save.

The reverse check starts from the policy card: the “Where it applies” block shows the tree of rate plans the policy is attached to, with a caption like “Applied to 1 rate plan”.

Result: the rate plan sells under the chosen policy — the guest sees its terms when booking.

Date overrides

The default policy is not always enough: for holidays or a local event you may want stricter rules, and softer ones for the rest of the calendar. That is what the “Date overrides” block on the same “Cancellation policies” tab of the rate plan card is for. While there are no overrides, the system says: “No overrides. The default policy always applies.”

Press “Override”.
Fill in the dialog: the “Rule name” — the placeholder hints: “E.g. “New Year”, “Weekends""; the “Repeat type” — “Fixed dates”; the “Start date” and “End date”; the “Policy” to apply on those dates; the “Priority”.
Save.

Result: on the chosen dates the rate plan sells under a different policy — the default one stays untouched.

What the guest sees and what the booking keeps

On the booking website, the guest sees the “Policy text” right at the rate selection step.

When a booking is created, a snapshot of the terms goes into it — the policy that was in effect at the moment of sale is fixed. The snapshot lives in the booking card, on the “Cancellation policy” tab.

This makes phone calls simple: a guest asks what happens to their money if they cancel — open their booking card, the “Cancellation policy” tab, and read out the terms of this exact booking. No need to dig through the policy list or the rate plans to answer.

Honest boundaries

There are no “free hours” in the model: the free window is counted in days only.
A channel selling your rate plan enforces the policy on its own sales under its own rules — uniform enforcement across all channels cannot be guaranteed.
Editing a policy does not rewrite past bookings: the snapshot is created once, when the booking is created, and keeps the terms as they were at the moment of sale.