IMPORTANT: This system is currently only supported by the Stripe, AIBMS and Opayo payment providers at this time. We will add other payment provider support as required and as supported by the provider.
Here is a brief summary of the new zero-deposit system on accommodation (and ITX/ITR flight fares with a ticketing deadline provided) and the settings we will need from you to activate it.
If the rate from the supplier is fully-refundable, we will allow payment of £0 (or equivalent currency) now and the full amount will be automatically taken from the customer lodged card X number of days prior to the cancellation deadline.
On the payment page, we pre-authorise £1 (and immediately cancel the pre-authorisation) on the customer's card and Stripe stores/tokenises the card on their system and we store the card token against the booking for taking the full amount at a later date.
If the rate from the supplier is partially-refundable, we will allow payment of only the non-refundable amount now and the remaining amount will be automatically taken from the customer lodged card X number of days prior to the cancellation deadline.
On the payment page, we take the payment for only the non-refundable amount on the customer's card and Stripe stores/tokenises the card on their system and we store the card token against the booking for taking the remainder at a later date.
If the payment succeeds, then you have the full payment for the property and the customer is informed that the payment was successfully taken and their booking is confirmed.
If the payment fails, we can retry up to X times (once per day), each time it sends the customer an email telling them that the payment has failed and their booking is at risk.
If the payment fails X times, we automatically cancel the booking and inform the customer.
In order to get this set up, we will require the following settings:
Days Before Payment/Ticketing Deadline - this is how many days before the cancellation policy you want to take the money (must be at least 1)
Number of Payment/Ticketing Retries - this is how many retries you want to attempt before cancellation (there is 1 retry per-day) so this value must be less than the above setting (can also be 0 if you don't want retries, but this would be considered bad usability as we believe you should warn the customer to make sure they have the required funds on their card for the following day)
Payment/Ticketing Cancel Policy - this is what happens when payment fails & our default setting for this is to automatically cancel with the supplier, although we do allow for it to notify you only without cancelling, but this means more work for you.
The system will send the following emails depending on the status of the automatic payment and so you will need to provide the content for each:
Payment Successful: Subject and email content
Payment Failed (first & retry attempts): Subject and email content
Final Payment Failed (normally when the booking is cancelled): Subject and email content
In all the emails above, you can use the following mail-merge tags if you want to embed any of the following dynamic content:
{{ORDER-REF}} - the order reference (eg. 123)
{{AMOUNT}} - amount taken/attempted to be taken (eg. 123.99 GBP)
{{ATTEMPT}} - the current attempt number (eg. 1)
{{MAXATTEMPTS}} - the number of attempts it will make (eg. 5)
