The latest innovation from Booking.com is already operational: Grace Period for prepaid reservations!
There are many and continuous changes that Booking.com foresees for the Hotels that are part of this Network, and here is the latest arrival: the Grace Period
What is the Grace Period?
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Nothing complicated, Booking simply provides a "tolerance" period for cancellations relating to non-refundable rates for prepaid reservations. The property has the option to choose between three options: 1 hour, 4 or 24 hours. Time within which the customer who has booked a prepaid room has the possibility to cancel it without any penalty within a short time from the moment of booking.
Why apply the Grace Period?
According to a Booking study, 36% of cancellations occur within the first 24 hours of booking. Activating this tool would reduce the number of errors and annoyance for hoteliers. How many times have we been contacted immediately after the credit card was charged and the desperate customer requests a refund because he booked by mistake or had second thoughts? And we have the difficult task of deciding whether to return the amount or respect the role of the "bad guys" (as Booking makes customers believe). Perfect, everything solved with this new Booking function, we can decide to give future guests time to understand that the booked rate is non-refundable!
Agree or not, fortunately we have the possibility to accept this condition.
How to deactivate the Grace Period?
The steps to follow are very simple: you need to access the Booking extranet and go to the "Property" section and select "Conditions". All information relating to payments, conditions and cancellations will appear from the menu. At the bottom right, in the "Other conditions" department, the "cancellation exceptions" window is displayed. At this point it is possible to accept the conditions by ticking the Grace period or Grace Policy box and choose from the various proposals how much time to leave the customer to cancel. Alternatively, if you do not wish to accept the Grace Policy, just remove the check from the box and everything will remain as always.
A short video will help you select the tool offered by Booking.com
Of course, at any time you can decide whether or not to use the Grace Period function.
But the question arises spontaneously: leave customers with a time limit within which they can cancel a prepaid card, then perhaps it can no longer be defined as non-refundable?
What do you think of the Grace Period which grants Booking at prepaid rates?
