Guides
Writing a cancellation policy you can actually enforce
A policy nobody follows is worse than no policy at all. How to pick a cutoff, what to do about genuine emergencies, and why one simple rule beats a tiered system every time.
Most cancellation policies fail for the same reason: they were written to cover every case, and so they’re impossible to apply to any of them.
You end up with something like *"cancellations within 48 hours forfeit 50% of the deposit, within 24 hours forfeit 100%, unless due to illness or unforeseen circumstances, at the discretion of management."* Every clause was added for a good reason. Together they mean that when someone cancels, you have to sit down and make a judgment call — which is exactly what a policy is supposed to save you from.
One cutoff, not a ladder
The strongest policy for a small business is a single line: cancel before X hours and you’re fine; cancel after and you’re not.
One cutoff is explainable in a sentence, so customers actually absorb it. It’s applicable without thought, so you don’t relitigate every cancellation. And it’s defensible, because there’s no arbitrary middle tier for someone to argue about.
Bookka is built around this deliberately: you set one cutoff window, and cancellations before it are treated differently from cancellations after it. That’s the whole model. It keeps your policy simple to explain, which is the only reason a policy ever works.
Choosing the window
The right cutoff isn’t about fairness in the abstract. It’s a practical question with a practical test: how long do you realistically need to refill the slot?
If you have a waitlist and a busy Instagram, you might fill a Thursday afternoon in three hours, and a 24-hour cutoff is generous. If your work is booked weeks out and each job involves ordering materials, 24 hours is nowhere near enough and you should be asking for several days.
- 24 hours suits most appointment businesses — salons, barbers, therapists, clinics. It’s the default people already expect, which means less explaining.
- 48 hours makes sense for longer appointments, or anywhere a gap is genuinely hard to refill.
- Several days to a week is reasonable for work involving travel, materials, or a whole day of your capacity.
Pick the shortest window that genuinely protects you. Every extra hour you demand is friction on a customer who’s trying to do the right thing, and the goal is to make cancelling properly *easier* than disappearing.
How it works with deposits
A policy without money attached is a request. That’s fine — plenty of businesses run happily on a stated policy and goodwill — but be clear-eyed that it depends entirely on customers choosing to care.
Once a deposit is involved, the policy has teeth, and the mechanics need to be automatic or you’ll spend your evenings issuing refunds by hand. In Bookka, when a refund is due under your policy it’s processed back through Stripe and the booking moves into a clear refunded state. The customer is notified by SMS and/or email, so nobody’s left wondering whether their money is coming back. Cancellations & refunds has the specifics.
The thing worth noticing here is that the customer gets told automatically. Most of the awkwardness in cancellation policies isn’t the rule — it’s the silence afterwards, where someone doesn’t know if they’ve been charged, refunded, or forgotten.
What to do about genuine emergencies
Someone’s child is sick. Someone was in a minor accident. Someone’s mum died. You are not going to keep their deposit, and you shouldn’t.
The mistake is trying to write this into the policy. The moment you add "except in genuine emergencies", you’ve made yourself the judge of what counts as genuine — and now every cancellation comes with a story, and you’re assessing it.
Keep the policy absolute and keep the discretion private. The written rule is one line with no exceptions. Then, when something real happens, you refund anyway — quietly, without a debate, because you decided to and not because they argued well enough.
A firm policy applied with occasional generosity reads as kindness. A soft policy applied inconsistently reads as favouritism.
That difference is worth more than it sounds. The first makes customers feel looked after. The second makes them wonder what the person before them got.
Say it where people will actually see it
A policy buried in a terms page nobody opened is not a policy you can enforce, and arguing otherwise in front of an upset customer never goes well.
- 1Put it on the booking page, near the point of confirmation — not in a footer.
- 2Repeat it in the confirmation message. That’s the one communication you know they read.
- 3Include it in the reminder, in one short line. This is where it does the most good: they’ve just been reminded, and they still have time to act.
- 4Say it out loud to new customers, once, in a friendly way. It stops being a rule and starts being how you work.
The wording
Short and human beats formal and complete. Something close to this covers it:
*"Need to change your appointment? No problem — just let us know at least 24 hours before and your deposit is refunded in full. Inside 24 hours we’re usually not able to refill the slot, so the deposit is kept."*
Two sentences. It explains the rule, gives the reason, and doesn’t read like a legal notice. The reason matters — "we can’t refill the slot" is a fact people accept, where "cancellations are non-refundable" is a rule people resent.
The rest of the picture
A policy handles the late cancellation. It doesn’t stop the booking that was never serious — that’s deposits — and it doesn’t help the person who simply forgot, which is reminders. Get all three right and no-shows stop being a thing you think about.
Run this on Bookka
Online bookings, deposits, automatic reminders and a cancellation policy that applies itself — in one place.