How do I charge no-show fees?

Save a customer's card at booking and charge a flat fee — after a reversible safety delay — when your team deliberately mark a no-show.

No-show protection saves a customer's card when they book online — nothing is charged at booking — and lets you charge a flat fee if they deliberately fail to turn up. Set it up in Settings → Payments & deposits → No-show protection.

It's Available on Plus plan and above, needs Stripe connected (connecting is owner-only), and only Owners and Admins see the page.

Switching it on

• Go to Settings → Payments & deposits → No-show protection and switch on Enable no-show protection. A pop-up explains this adds a no-show fee clause to your customer terms — click Turn on.
• Set the No-show fee. This is a flat fee per booking (per table) — not per guest. The whole party is covered by one fee (deposits, by contrast, are per person). Leave it at £0 and protection does nothing — the page warns you.
• Set the Minimum party size — only parties this size or larger are asked to save a card. Set 1 to apply to every online booking.
• Set the Safety delay before charging (0–168 hours; the default is 3). After a booking is marked a no-show, the fee stays pending for this window — re-seating the customer or restoring the booking cancels it. Set 0 to charge almost straight away.
• Click Save changes.

The two extra switches

• Also charge for late cancellations (default off) — the same flat fee applies if a customer cancels inside your free-cancellation window, not just when they vanish. It only ever applies to a cancellation made by the customer themselves — a cancellation your team records from the dashboard never charges the customer. This only works once you've set a Cancellation deadline in Settings → Bookings → Booking rules, under Booking windows — with no deadline, every cancellation counts as on time and the fee never applies. A customer cancelling online inside the window isn't charged blind: their manage-booking page shows a Late-cancellation fee applies dialog naming the exact amount, and the cancellation only goes through if they press Cancel and pay the fee (Keep booking backs out with nothing charged). If the booking has no chargeable saved card — or this switch is off — the customer can't cancel online inside the window at all and is asked to call you instead. Unlike a no-show fee, a late-cancellation fee is taken straight away (a cancellation is final, so there's no reversal window).
• Card required to complete booking (default off) — when on, qualifying customers must save a card before their booking is confirmed, on both your booking page and the embedded widget. When off, qualifying bookings go through without a card — those bookings are unprotected and can never be charged.

How the fee is actually charged

Only a member of your team deliberately marking the booking as a no-show and choosing to charge ever arms the fee — the automatic no-show system never charges, and a customer who showed up is never charged. Arming the charge asks you to confirm your password. After the safety delay the saved card is charged and the customer is emailed. If their card is declined, the fee isn't collected — you're alerted so you can chase it manually; it is never retried automatically.

The card is only held while the booking is live. As a deliberate privacy protection, the customer's saved card is released automatically the moment their booking finishes — marked completed or cleared, or cancelled. That means a fee can only be charged by marking the no-show directly: once a booking has been completed or cleared, switching it to a no-show afterwards can't charge anything, because the card has already been released. Marking a no-show itself never releases the card, so the charge decision at that moment works as normal.

Bookings that already pay — a deposit or a pay-in-full booking — won't also be asked to save a card; the payment covers the no-show risk, and the fee never applies to a paid-in-full booking. A charged fee can be refunded later from the booking (password confirmation, or a manager's PIN approval).

Related: How do I mark a no-show (and charge the fee)? · When is a no-show fee actually taken? · How far ahead (and how late) can customers book? · What does the customer see when paying a deposit or saving a card?