How do I cancel a booking (and what happens to the deposit)?

Cancel a booking with an optional personal note, choose whether to refund or retain the deposit, and restore if you change your mind.

Open the booking and click Cancel on its action bar. What happens next depends on whether the customer paid a deposit. Cancelling needs the booking-cancel permission; refunding a deposit also needs the refund permission.

Cancelling a booking with no deposit

• Click Cancel. For a booking with a customer email, a pop-up titled Cancel this booking? appears with Add a personal note (optional, max 500 chars) — anything you type appears in the cancellation email to the customer.
• A confirmation dialog follows. When the customer can actually be reached, it shows a ticked Notify the customer by email / Notify the customer by text message / Notify the customer by email and text message box — the wording matches exactly which messages will send for this booking. Leave it ticked to notify the customer, or untick it to cancel silently.
• Click Confirm to cancel, or Go Back to back out.

If the customer can't be notified automatically — no email address or mobile number on file, or your cancellation notifications are switched off in Settings — the dialog says so plainly instead of promising a notification, and no notify box is shown. The booking moves to the Cancelled tab either way.

Cancelling a booking with a paid deposit

A Cancel Booking dialog appears with three choices:

• Cancel & Issue Refund — cancels and returns the deposit to the customer's card. You'll be asked to confirm your password (or approve with a manager's PIN where offered).
• Cancel & Retain Deposit — cancels and keeps the deposit. No password prompt, since no money moves.
• Go Back — changes nothing.

If the customer is already outside your refund policy (for example, past the cancellation deadline), the refund button reads Refund deposit anyway — an explicit override.

This dialog carries the same ticked Notify the customer by … box as the plain cancel — untick it to cancel without messaging the customer. The deposit choice and the notify choice are independent: keeping or refunding the deposit works exactly the same either way.

A paid-in-full booking gets the same choice with honest wording — the dialog says the booking "was paid in full", and the buttons read Refund payment anyway / Cancel & Retain Payment.

Restoring a cancelled booking

Open the cancelled booking and click Restore — it returns to confirmed. If the deposit (or full payment) was refunded when it was cancelled, the pop-up warns that it won't be re-charged and points you at Request payment on the booking — send the customer a payment link if you need to collect it again.

Cancel vs delete

Walk-ins and waitlist entries (including self-service waitlist joins) show Delete instead of Cancel — they never received a booking confirmation, so deleting removes the entry without sending the customer anything. Cancelling keeps the record in the Cancelled tab and can notify the customer.

Declining a pending online request works the same way as cancelling — see the pending-bookings guide.

Related: When do customers get their deposit back? · How do payment links work? · How do I approve or decline online booking requests? · How do I mark a no-show (and charge the fee)? · How do approvals with a manager's PIN work?