How to cancel and refund a direct booking

When a guest paid on your Nowistay website, your booking widget or a payment link, you cancel the booking in Nowistay and choose in the same step what happens to the money: refund everything, refund part of it, or keep it. The refund leaves your own Stripe account and goes back to the guest’s card.

Use it when a guest cancels, or when someone booked dates you can’t honour.

Cancel and refund from Nowistay

1. Open the booking from Bookings.
2. Click Edit.
3. Set Status to Cancelled and click Save.
4. The Cancel this booking window shows the amount the guest paid. Choose Refund everything, Refund part of it (then type the Amount to refund, up to the amount paid) or Keep the payment, refund nothing.
5. Click Confirm cancellation.

Then:

• the booking is cancelled and its dates reopen on all your connected channels and on your website;
• the refund is sent to the guest’s card from your Stripe account. It usually shows on their statement within 5 to 10 business days;
• in the booking’s payment section, Payment status shows Refunded, with the refunded amount.

Stripe does not give back its processing fees when a payment is refunded: a full refund still costs you the card fees of the original payment. This is how Stripe refunds work.

Example: a guest paid €600 for 4 nights in your seaside flat and cancels 3 weeks before arrival. Your conditions give back 50% at that point. You set the booking to Cancelled, choose Refund part of it, enter 300 and confirm: the guest gets €300 back and the dates are open again on Airbnb, Booking.com and your website.

Refund from your Stripe dashboard instead

You can also send the refund yourself from your Stripe dashboard, for example to refund in several steps:

1. Cancel the booking in Nowistay as above, choosing Keep the payment, refund nothing. The dates reopen on your channels.
2. In your Stripe dashboard, open the guest’s payment and refund it.

When the Stripe refund covers the whole payment, Nowistay picks it up and the booking’s Payment status changes to Refunded. A partial refund made in Stripe does not change the payment status in Nowistay.

Payment in two instalments

If the guest pays in two instalments, the refund covers only what has been charged so far. Once the booking is cancelled, the second payment is never taken, whatever you chose in the window.

Booking with a payment request not paid yet

If the guest has not paid yet, there is nothing to refund: set the booking to Cancelled and save. The dates reopen and the payment link stops working.

Security deposit and paid extras

• A security deposit collected in advance is refunded in full automatically when the booking is cancelled (see How to set up security deposits).
• Paid extras bought by the guest are not refunded automatically. You get an email for each one and decide whether to refund it from your Stripe dashboard.

If the refund fails

You get an email and the booking stays cancelled. It usually happens when your Stripe balance is too low to cover the refund, or when the original payment is more than 180 days old. Refund the guest manually from your Stripe dashboard.

Good to know

• A cancelled booking whose payment was refunded cannot be confirmed again: create a new booking instead.
• Nowistay does not tell the guest for you: send them a message, or create an automated message for cancelled bookings (see How to set up automated guest emails).
• Bookings from Airbnb, Booking.com and the other platforms are cancelled and refunded on the platform itself, under its own rules.