Setting your cancellation policy

You can edit your cancellation Policies to control how much of the Booking fee will be forfeited if a Client cancels, depending on the time period. Changes to your cancellation policies will automatically show up in your Terms & Conditions, so your clients will be able to see them.

This article also covers what it looks like from the client’s perspective when they attempt to cancel their booking under various scenarios with different cancellation policies set up.

Setting up your cancellation policy

Steps

1. Navigate to Setup >  System Settings > Business Detail

2. Click on the Bookings tab

3. Scroll down and select your Cancellation Notice

   1. This is the minimum notice allowable for a client to cancel online.

4. Select your Cancellation Fees for each time period

5. Click Save
   
   

Client cancels within the minimum cancellation notice period

In this example the Cancellation Notice is set to 48 hours. If the client attempts to cancel within 48 hours they will be prompted with this message.

Please note that it is up to the client to contact your business to advise that they wish to cancel. If they email or text and the message isn’t received in time to the staff member that is potentially driving to the client’s pickup address, there is a chance that you may drive there and they then advise you they wanted to cancel the booking.

If you’ve set up upfront payments for bookings, it means that you already have the money to cover any applicable cancellation fees, however, it would be preferable that you don’t drive out to the client before finding this out.

One option is to set up the minimum Cancellation Notice to be 1 hour instead, that way a client can cancel themselves online, they will be advised of any cancellation fees (see section below), and the booking will be removed from the staff member’s calendar (and optionally the staff member has an email/SMS alert set up for any same day booking cancellations). Then there is also a chance that another booking could be added there instead for anyone last minute.

Client cancels after the minimum cancellation notice period - with cancellation fee

In this example the system has been set up to incur a 50% cancellation fee if they cancel outside of the minimum cancellation notice of 48 hours. If the client attempts to cancel with more than 48 hours notice, they will be prompted with this message to advise that a cancellation fee will apply.

Client cancels after the minimum cancellation notice period - no cancellation fee

If the system has been set up as follows to not incur any cancellation fees if they cancel outside of the minimum cancellation notice, then the client is able to cancel their booking online. If the client had already paid upfront for their booking, their booking fee will be credited to their account, and can be used for their next booking (or optionally refunded. Please refer to the Cancelling a booking article for more information.