FAQ Risk-Free Reservations

Note: This feature isn’t available everywhere yet. We’ll contact you when it’s available for your property.

How does payment work with Risk-Free Reservations?

Since the majority of guests that book flexible policies don’t actually end up cancelling, in most cases, you’ll be able to handle payment as normal. That means you’ll still charge the guest’s card or virtual credit card in your extranet or channel manager. However, if the guest decides to cancel, we’ll make a virtual credit card available to you.

What happens if a guest cancels?

If the reservation is Risk-Free, we’ll try to find a new guest for the room. As soon as we get a replacement guest, we’ll send you a modified reservation for the same date, but for the price you’re selling at in that moment. If we don't manage to resell your room, we’ll pay you the original price that it was booked for.

How can I get the new guest’s credit card details or a deposit?

For reservations that aren’t cancelled by the guest, you’ll be able to see the guest’s credit card details when the new (upgraded) cancellation policy expires.

For cancelled reservations, it’ll be the new guest who pays – if we can find one. If not, we’ll pay you the same day the original guest would have checked in. Either way, you’ll get paid.

How does the reallocation work?

If you get a cancellation for a booking of 2 nights or more, we'll always respect your length-of-stay restriction to find one or more reservations that cover the original dates. If we can't cover the whole range, you'll get the full original price for the room nights we couldn't find a replacement for.

What we pay you for that room will be the price that’s applicable on the day the room is resold. If we fail to resell the room, we‘ll pay you the original price that the original guest booked for.

What if the guest has an invalid credit card and Booking.com only releases it 24 hours before check-in?

Nothing changes with regards to invalid credit cards, apart from when you can view the card details. We’ll only release payment details when the reservation becomes non-refundable according to the original policy. The rest is the same: log into the system, check the credit card and, if the credit card is invalid, mark it accordingly. If the guest fails to give you a valid credit card, we’ll still pay you through a virtual credit card.

How can I see which of my reservations are Risk-Free Reservations?

To find out which reservations are Risk-Free, go to the 'Reservations' tab in your extranet. In the column ‘Status’, reservations that are part of the programme will have a ‘Risk-free’ tag. This is the same for connected properties.

How can I opt out of Risk-Free Reservations?

We understand that your business model may not suit this programme. If you don’t want to offer Risk-Free Reservations, just sign into your Booking.com extranet, go to the ‘Property’ menu, then click on Policies. Scroll down to ‘Risk-Free Reservations’ and opt out. If you’d like to rejoin the programme at some point in the future, you can use the same process to opt back in.

Will the programme affect my pricing?

Your original rate (semi-flexible or non-refundable, for example) will remain untouched. For selected reservations, and only when we can offer a more flexible policy than your current one, we’ll upgrade it for the guest, whereas from your side, the original policy will remain in place. This means that while we offer the upgraded (more flexible) policy to the guest, you won’t need to offer any discounts yourself. If this doesn’t align with your business model, please let us know through your extranet ‘Inbox’ tab.

What happens when a guest books more than one room and only cancels a few?

If a guest only cancels some of their rooms, we’ll do our best to sell those free rooms to other guests. If we can’t reallocate all the rooms, we’ll pay you for any rooms we can’t sell. These reservations will appear as ‘Partially paid by Booking.com’ in your extranet. This means you can charge the original guest for a part of the reservation and we’ll pay you the rest.

Learn more about Booking.com's Risk-Free Reservations