Cancellation Preferences and Smart Policy Overview

This guide outlines the refreshed cancellation policies and the new Smart Policy feature, designed to help you optimise your bookings and reduce cancellations. Here’s everything you need to know about the updated options and how to choose the best policy for your property.

What is the Smart Policy?

Our Smart Policy is an intelligent feature that dynamically adjusts your property’s cancellation policy based on its performance. It takes the guesswork out of selecting a policy and ensures your property has the best possible setup for maximising bookings and minimising cancellations.

As part of the Smart Policy, we also include a Non-Refundable Policy option for properties listed on Airbnb and Booking.com. This option offers a 10% discount to attract guests willing to book on a fully non-refundable basis, providing an additional incentive to secure high-quality bookings.

Key Benefits of the Smart Policy

• Reduce cancellations: Attract more reliable guests.

• Hands-free optimisation: Policies are automatically adjusted for you.

• Increase booking quality: Aligns cancellation policies with property performance.

• Boost conversions with Non-Refundable Policies: The 10% discount on Airbnb and Booking.com appeals to guests seeking value, increasing booking security and reducing the likelihood of cancellations.

When you choose the Smart Policy, the feature evaluates your property’s bookings and cancellation trends regularly and makes adjustments as needed. This ensures your property remains competitive and optimised at all times, while the Non-Refundable Policy option further enhances your booking reliability and revenue potential.

Cancellation Policy Options

You can now select a tailored cancellation policy for each property, giving you greater flexibility to meet your property’s specific needs. Whether you value flexibility to attract more guests, reliability to minimize cancellations, or a balance of both, our updated options are designed to help you optimize bookings and maximize revenue.

Choosing the right cancellation policy is vital to your success. It enables you to attract the right guests, reduce cancellations, and ensure your property performs at its best. With options ranging from Super Flexible to Non-Refundable, and the intelligence of the Smart Policy, you have everything you need to create a winning strategy for your property.

Non-Refundable Discount

You can provide guests with an additional booking option by enabling non-refundable rates. This allows your properties on Booking.com and Airbnb to offer guests an additional non-refundable booking option that provides them with a 10% discount, making it especially appealing to value-conscious travellers.

This option is ideal for:

• Properties with a high level of booking certainty.

• Peak seasons or high-demand periods where bookings are more predictable.

Additionally, properties using this feature tend to experience lower overall cancellation rates, leading to higher realised revenues. Enabling non-refundable rates is a simple way to increase booking security while attracting budget-focused guests.

How to Get Started

You can easily choose the cancellation preference for each of your properties within your Travelnest Account within the property edit section. From there you can: 

1. Enable Smart Cancellations:

   • Switch Smart Policy on to enable dynamic cancellation preferences. 

2. Manually Select a Policy:

   • If you prefer, log into your account and choose from the updated policy options.

3. Review Your Policy Regularly:

   • Keep an eye on how your selected policy is performing to ensure it’s meeting your goals.

Please note that: For Airbnb, reservations in Italy or made by South Korean guests will have a different interpretation that should be checked here.

If you have any questions or need help with selecting a cancellation preference, please get in touch with our Customer Support team, you can find out how here. 

Questions?

If you have any questions about the new cancellation policies or Smart Cancellations, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team. We’re here to help!