FAQ Q332: Can I set up automatic refund of payments when a reservation is being cancelled?

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.
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 Stripe Payment Intent.
Automatic refunds are not supported if you have the Shopping cart mode turned in for your Planyo site.
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:
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.
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.
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