Cancellation fees are applied to reservations during the cancellation in case of manual cancellation, or automatically in case of cancellation coming from OTAs or Online Check-in. How does the application of cancellation fees work?
You can choose from two ways of applying cancellation fees. Go to Property Settings / General / Reservation Settings and choose the Cancellation rules:
- Ask and apply per policies - this option uses cancellation policies to apply cancellation fees.
- Set total as due automatically - this option sets the total cost of cancelled nights as cancellation fees. It means that the total reservation won't change after cancellation.
> See how to set up rate cancellation policies
With Ask and apply per policies option, the system checks your cancellation policy settings and applies cancellation costs accordingly. See below how that works for manual and OTA's cancellations.
Manual cancellations
When you cancel a reservation in FrontDesk Master directly, by changing the reservation status to Cancelled, the Confirm cancellation window appears:
There, you can decide how the cancellation fee should be applied:
- Apply cancellation charges - this option will apply cancellation charges according to the reservation rate cancellation policy. E.g., the rate cancellation policy is Non Refundable, 100% of the reservation cost will be marked as due.
- No charges - the cancellation cost will be 0.
- First night's cost - the system will apply the cost of the first night as due for cancellation charge.
- x% of the total price - the system will apply the selected % of the total reservation as the cancellation charge.
- x$ - the system will apply the selected amount as a cancellation charge.
On click on Cancel reservation button, the system will cancel the reservation and redirect you to the payment window if there are any cancellation charges. You can close Take Payment window to register the payment later.
When you open a cancelled reservation, you can see how the cancellation fees are applied. The Overview table shows you all cancelled nights with the information if the night is due or not. See the orange $ button . It means that the night is included into the cancellation cost and affects the Total and Total Due of the reservation.
You can manually adjust which nights are due and their amount.
> $ button means that a night is not due (there is no cancellation cost) and it is not included into Total nor Total Due.
> $ button means that the night is due (there is a cancellation cost) and it is included into Total and Total Due. $ b
> Click on $ button to change it and mark night as due, or $ button to change it and not include the night into the balance due.
> You can edit the night's Total Due value in the table directly. Click on the Total Due amount (when the night is due) and enter the cancellation cost for the selected night.
As you can see, only those nights that are DUE (selected with $ button ) are included into the Total of the reservation and the balance due.
> The city tax will be removed automatically from the cancellation fees when reservation is cancelled. To include it, you can edit the city tax value in the reservation form directly.
Automatic cancellations
Cancellations from OTAs or Online Check-in are applied automatically, thus FrontDesk Master will automatically apply the cancellation charges according to the rate cancellation policy. The system will use Apply cancellation charges option from the 'Confirm cancellation' window.
> If cancellation policies are not set up, then the system will apply no cancellation charges to reservation, resulting with Total reservation and Balance Due equal to $0.
You can always adjust the cancellation cost of bookings from OTAs by changing the nights and marking them as DUE using $ button in the reservation form.
