Set up a cancellation fee to collect revenue when a pet parent cancels their reservation within a certain window of time.

Before You Begin

These settings can be managed by a user with Admin permissions. 

Set Up a Cancellation Fee

1. Navigate to Admin » Reservation Types and Services Configuration and edit your reservation type(s) to utilize the Self-Cancellation Window field. This field can be used to make it so that customers' have to call the facility to cancel their reservation if it's within that number of minutes. For example, if you consider a late-cancel 24 hours prior to the start, you'll make the number of minutes 1440 so that the customer isn't able to cancel by themselves after that time.
   
   
2. Navigate to Admin » Open Line Items to create a new item to use for the late cancellation fee. We'll use an open line item so that this is easily accessible in the cart and so that you can leave a note on the item for the date(s) that were late cancelled when charging it to customers. Our help article on how to create these is here: Set Up Open Line Items (How-To)
   
   
3. Optional: Navigate to Admin » Cancellation Reasons. Create a "Late Cancel" cancellation reason to use for this purpose. You may also choose to utilize Email Custom Text that explains the policy and that you will be charging your late cancel fee per your policy to be included in your cancellation email.
   
   
   • If you entered custom email text on the cancellation reason, navigate to Admin » System Email and edit the Reservation Cancellation email template to add the {cancellation_reason} variable to the body of the email where you'd like to substitute the Late Cancel policy text entered under the Reservation Type settings.

Now, when you have a customer late cancel (which would need to be done by contacting the facility), staff will cancel the reservation and charge them the fee using the Open Line Item in the Shopping Cart. If the customer has a card on file, you can charge that, or you can apply it as owed to the account and check out with No Payment. 

Related Resources

• Change Cancellation Reason How-To
• Add Custom Text to Reservation Email Templates How-To
• Customize Email Templates How-To
• Set Up Open Line Items How-To
• Cancellations Reports Topic Outline
• Reservation Deposits Topic Outline