What your customers can do themselves

Your booking site isn’t only for making reservations. Customers can come back through View, change or cancel your booking to handle things themselves, which keeps routine questions out of your inbox. It’s worth knowing exactly what they can do, because some of it moves money.

How they get in

From your booking site, a customer chooses View, change or cancel your booking (under Book a car, and again in the footer) and enters their confirmation number and the email on the booking. There’s no account and no password.

Both have to match. A wrong pair simply returns “not found” — it never reveals whether a booking exists, so the page can’t be used to fish for other people’s reservations.

What they can do

• View the booking — dates, vehicle, pick-up location, total and the deposit hold.
• Download a receipt or invoice — the same PDF you can produce from the operator app.
• Pay a balance — when you’ve sent them a pay link. (Signing happens during checkout; there is no separate signing link to send.)
• Update the card on file — the recovery path when a payment fails; on a long-term rental this also collects the overdue installment and resumes automatic billing.
• Stop a month-to-month renewal — on an auto-renewing long-term rental.
• Cancel the booking.

Cancellations and refunds

This is the one that affects your money, so it’s worth being precise:

• Cancelling before your late-cancellation window refunds what they paid online, in full, to their original card — automatically. Money you collected yourself (cash, your own terminal) isn’t refunded automatically.
• Inside it, your late-cancellation fee is kept from what they paid and the rest is refunded automatically. The page shows both amounts before they confirm. If they paid less than the fee, what they paid is kept and nothing more is charged automatically; the page tells them the rest may still be charged to the card they saved, and collecting it is your call.
• If nothing was paid online, there’s nothing to refund and the page says so.
• Once a rental is under way, self-service cancellation is closed off and they’re asked to call you.

You choose the window and the fee in setup step 4 or Settings → Reservations, and renters see them before they pay. The window counts back from the pick-up time on the branch’s clock. A booking made inside it can still be cancelled free for an hour after booking. Each booking keeps the rule it was made under, so changing the setting only affects bookings made afterwards. A booking made before your site showed a fee keeps the old rule: free until 24 hours before pick-up, non-refundable after. If a refund fails, the booking still cancels and is flagged for manual processing. To make an exception in a customer’s favour, refund them from your Stripe dashboard; see Deposits & refunds.

Actions that change the booking — an online booking, a self-service cancellation — land in your activity log, and cancellations record the reason they picked. Simply looking a booking up or downloading a receipt isn’t logged.

It works on their phone

The whole flow follows your branding and works on a phone — which is where most customers will open it.

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To brand the site itself, see Customize your booking site. Questions? Contact us.