Your cancellation, reschedule and no-show policy

1. What this policy controls

Every confirmation and reminder a guest gets carries a secure link to manage their own booking, so they can reschedule or cancel without calling you. This policy, on Settings, Booking rules, decides how much notice they need to use that link, and what happens once they've left it too late.

It works the same way for both verticals: a guest managing a table booking and a guest managing an appointment use the same link and the same rules.

• Whether guest self-service is switched on at all.
• How many hours' notice a reschedule needs.
• How many hours' notice a cancellation needs, which can be a different number.
• What happens once one of those windows has closed.

2. Turning guest self-service on or off

The Allow guests to change or cancel online checkbox is the master switch. Turn it off and every guest is told to contact your business directly instead; no self-service link works.

Below it, a single Cut off field sets the fallback notice window, in hours before the booking, used until you pick a named preset or your own custom numbers.

3. Picking a preset, or setting your own

Four choices let you start from a preset, or build your own pair of windows.

In every preset, the cancellation window is at least as long as the reschedule window. Moving a booking still keeps the slot filled and costs you nothing; cancelling loses it outright, so it's reasonable to ask for more notice before a guest walks away entirely.

4. What guests see, and what happens once a window closes

Guests read your policy as one sentence, the same one the What guests will read box on the card previews as you edit. It appears just above the Confirm booking button when they book, and on their manage-booking page until one of the windows closes.

• Refuse it, and ask the guest to contact you (the default for every preset): past a window, the button for that action disappears from the guest's page, and they're shown your notice period with a prompt to get in touch directly. The other action stays available until its own window closes, so on Standard a guest 30 hours out can still change their time online but has to contact you to cancel.
• Allow it anyway, flagged for your attention: the guest can still change or cancel online past the window, but they see a late-notice warning first, and the booking is flagged so your team can follow up.

5. No-show fees, a separate but related setting

A cancellation policy is about notice. A no-show fee is about money, and it lives just below it on the same page, under Deposits & no-show protection.

A no-show fee only works in Card on file mode: instead of charging anything up front, checkout saves a guest's card with no charge. It needs Stripe connected and verified, and it's mutually exclusive with taking a deposit at booking time, so a company uses one or the other, never both.

To charge it, a team member first marks the booking Cancelled, or marks it as a no-show. Once that's done, a Charge no-show fee button appears on that booking's own detail view, showing the amount that was locked in when the card was saved. Clicking it opens a confirmation dialog before anything is charged; nothing is ever charged automatically, and the button works the same way on both an appointment and a hospitality reservation.