Overview
We're extremely reluctant to cancel paid guest bookings once they've been made.
One of the core understandings of the agreement we get owners to sign when we take on the management of their home, is the reality that Holiday Letting your home means you can make money from your home, and in doing so you agree that the personal use of your home will be subject to booking it yourself (to avoid double bookings, allow us to manage the home, etc) - essentially giving up the ‘guarantee’ of access to your home at all times (see
The Reality of Holiday Letting for more information).
The way we mitigate this issue across all of our homes, is to empower owners to make their own bookings (which is what HomHero enables owners to do). The dates for your own home are available in HomHero to make owner bookings up to 24 months out, and guests are only able to book a maximum of 12 months out (see
Owner Bookings for more information). This means owners have 12+ months to identify and book dates they wish to use themselves before guests can book them. We would encourage all owners, if in doubt, to book dates if they may want them, and then cancel the bookings to release them if/when they decide they don't want to use the dates.
Unfortunately, our industry has been rife with owner-led cancellations in the past. Something we have prided ourselves on through our 24+ years in operation, is not being a business where this happens. In addition to us not wanting to do it from a reputation perspective, the third-party websites (such as Airbnb, Booking.com & Stayz/VRBO) have increasingly been introducing some fairly impactful penalties for bookings that are cancelled from our end. These penalties are a combination of financial (the rate of which is a sliding scale based on when the booking was made, when it was due to be held, etc), and also (for some sites) relate to a 'downgrading' all of the listings under our business, meaning they appear further down the results list when guests search for available homes.
What this means is that if a cancellation is made at one of our homes, all the other homes we manage are impacted negatively. We don’t think it’s reasonable to allow owners to impact other people’s homes adversely by cancelling bookings, so we hold all owners to the same standard.
As the above details, there are quite a few flow-on effects of this type of cancellation, so we're very keen to avoid them for the homes we manage.
Exceptions
Some of the impact of cancelling guest bookings may be ‘appealed’, depending on third party website where the booking was made, and the circumstances surrounding the reason(s) behind cancelling a booking (such as the home being sold, significant damage at the home, etc). Talk to us if this is the case and we can explain the specific circumstances in relation to the booking(s) in question.
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