Important to know:
To cancel reservations made via your SiteMinder’s booking engine from your SiteMinder platform, go to the Reservations page.
Reservations made via your connected channels need to be cancelled on the channels’ extranets. Contact your channels’ support teams for further guidance.
Cancel a direct booking reservation
Sometimes guests might need to cancel their direct booking reservations. If their room rate booked allows cancellations, they might be able to cancel by themselves using the reservation confirmation e-mail. But when their rate doesn’t allow cancellations or if they contact you to help them, you can quickly cancel their direct booking reservation for them.
Before cancelling a direct booking reservation, consider the following:
You might need to charge the guest the agreed cancellation fee — if the Cancellation policy of the room rate booked has been breached and a cancellation fee is part of the terms and conditions agreed upon when your guest booked.
You cannot change the status of a cancelled reservation back to Confirmed, Checked in, or Checked out.
You cannot update any details on a cancelled reservation.
To cancel a direct booking reservation, follow the steps below:
Go to the Reservations page.
Find and open the direct booking you want to cancel.
Click on the ellipsis button (...) and choose the Cancel reservation button.
Confirm you want to cancel the reservation by clicking on Cancel reservation once more.
SiteMinder will only notify the main guest of a cancellation if your booking engine cancellation e-mail is enabled. You can find the cancellation e-mail in Direct booking > Configuration > Guest communications > Reservation cancellation.
Availability replenishment after a direct booking cancellation
After you cancel a direct booking reservation, the room type will become automatically available to be booked by your potential guests in your booking engine, but the replenishment of the availability in your SiteMinder platform inventory will be handled differently depending on your settings and integrations. Check the scenarios below.
Scenario 1: if you have a PMS or CRS with inventory capabilities enabled
If your PMS or CRS has inventory enabled — meaning that it is able to send availability, rates, and restrictions to your SiteMinder platform — your availability will be automatically increased by your PMS or CRS after you cancel a direct booking reservation.
Scenario 2: if you don’t have a PMS or CRS (or you do but it doesn’t have inventory capabilities enabled)
If you don’t have a PMS or CRS with inventory capabilities enabled — meaning that it is not able to update availability, rates, and restrictions on your SiteMinder platform — your availability will be managed according to your SiteMinder platform Auto-replenishment setting.
If Auto-replenishment is enabled — your availability in your SiteMinder platform will be increased automatically after a cancellation.
If Auto-replenishment is disabled — your availability in your SiteMinder platform will not be increased automatically after a cancellation. You will need to update the inventory manually after cancelling the reservation.
Note:
To enable Auto-replenishment, go to your property name > Property settings > General information > Auto-replenishment.
To update your room type’s availability manually, go to Distribution > Inventory.