Note that this feature is support only for a limited subset of payment gateways available in Planyo. At the moment this includes: Stripe Checkout and Mollie. For other payment gateways, see
the solution from Q335 which automatically issues a coupon to the customers whose reservations have been cancelled.
You can turn on automatic refunds on reservation cancellations on the
Active features page. In
Refund payments on cancellations you can select for which
type of cancellations automatic refund of payments should be made:
- Only when cancelled by administrator - here the automatic refund will be made only when the reservation is cancelled by a site administrator, moderator or a resource administrator.
- When cancelled by administrator or for automatic cancellations - the refund will be made additionally for automatic cancellations. Please note that cancellations made by API with
the cancel action (see the do_reservation_action() API method) are treated as automatic cancellation in this feature.
- All (including user and automatic cancellations) - here the refund will be made for all kind of cancellations, including those triggered by the client.
API cancellations with the user_cancel action are considered user cancellations.
Warning: Refunds cannot be undone. If the reservation is e.g. re-confirmed, you will need to ask the client to make a new payment.
Optionally, you can also set up a cancellation fee to be deducted from the refunded amount. You can express it as a percent of the total reservation price (e.g. 10%) or as a fixed amount (e.g. 25).
Note that in case of a percent value, the total reservation price, including additional and custom products, is taken as the basis. The fixed amount fee is applied per reservation, regardless of any additional
price components like products.
If the cancellation fee exceeds the reservation payment amount, no refund is made.
If you don't want to preserve any fee, simply leave the
... cancellation fee field empty.
You can also use a template in the
... cancellation fee field. After processing the template against a reservation it should output a percent (e.g. 10%), a fixed amount (e.g. 25) or an empty value for no fee. In the template, you can use standard reservation tags from
FAQ204. Using conditional logic in the template allows you apply a custom cancellation fee. You can test your template in the
tag playground. Please test your template well to make sure it covers various situations.
You can also set a custom cancellation fee for a reservation. You can do this in
pricing manger. In the rule cell, choose 'Cancellation fee' as the value type. The fee can be expressed as an amount, e.g. 100, or as a percentage of the price calculated so far. The cancellation fee set in Pricing Manager overrides the one entered in the
... cancellation fee field.
Note that some payment services don't support partial refunds and they allow only full refund of the paid amount. In such a case, the cancellation fee will not be preserved and a full refund will be made.
Shopping cart
When a reservation being canceled is in a shopping cart (with Shopping Cart mode enabled in your Planyo site), the values of other reservations are taken into account when determining the refund amount.
The amount retained, which will not be refunded, is calculated as the sum of the prices of valid reservations and the cancellation fees of canceled reservations.
For example, consider three reservations in a shopping cart: R1 (€100), R2 (€80) and R3 (€70). These reservations were confirmed by a payment of €250.
The cancellation fee in Active features is set to €15.
If R3 is cancelled, the payment amount to retain is calculates as €100 (price of R1) + €80 (price of R3) + €15 (cancellation fee of R3) totaling €195.
Therefore, €55 will be automatically refunded to the client (€250 - €195).
If R2 is additionally cancelled, the amount retained would be €100 (price of R1) + €15 (cancellation fee of R2) + €15 (cancellation fee of R3) totaling €130.
Consequently, from the €195 remaining from the initial payment (€55 already refunded after R3's cancellation), an additional €65 will be refunded to the client.
Custom solution for automated refunds
If you'd like to automate refunds in your business but the feature above doesn't meet your needs, you can do this with a custom approach on your end.
Doing this requires basic programming skills using any server-side technology such as PHP, Java or Node.js.
In your Planyo site, you can set up webhooks that will
notify a script on your server when a cancellation for one of your reservations is being made. Please see
FAQ 222 to learn more about server notification. In the script,
you can use the API interface of your payment gateway to do the refund on your own. This solution allows you to customize all aspects of the refund, like applying personalized cancellation fee,
partial shopping cart refunds etc.