Cancellations and No-shows

Three things end a stay before it happens, and they mean different things to the business. Release Hold lets a tentative booking go: the guest never committed, so nothing is charged. Cancel withdraws a firm booking, and the property's cancellation policy decides whether there is a fee. No Show records that the arrival day came and the guest never appeared, which has its own fee rule and can be reported to the channel.

All three live in the status chip menu in the reservation header and in the Actions menu. An In-House guest must be checked out instead.

Release a hold

Click the status chip and choose Release Hold, or open Actions and click Release Hold. The dialog reads Release this hold? — "The held room and inventory go back to availability. No cancellation fee is charged for a hold." Confirm with Release Hold, or back out with Keep hold.

Releasing a hold runs the same machinery as a cancellation — status Cancelled, inventory and room given back, availability queued to Channex, arrival-prep housekeeping tasks cancelled — with one difference: no fee is ever charged, because a hold is not a commitment. The stay comes off the folio as reversal lines prefixed "Hold released: ", for example "Hold released: Room charge — Deluxe King — 2026-10-12 to 2026-10-14 (2 nights)".

A hold nobody acts on releases itself when its expiry passes; a background sweep does it every few minutes, down the same path. See Statuses and Lifecycle.

Cancel a reservation

What happens:

• Status becomes Cancelled and the cancellation time is stamped (shown as Cancelled on the Revisions tab).
• Inventory for every room's type and nights is given back. If inventory rows are missing for part of the stay the cancellation is refused with "Inventory is not configured for the entire stay".
• Channels: an availability update is queued to Channex for each affected room type and date range, so the OTAs reopen the units.
• Housekeeping: open arrival-prep tasks for the reservation's rooms today are cancelled.
• Folio: the stay is reversed and the cancellation fee, if the policy charges one, is posted in its place. See Fees and the folio.
• Notification "Reservation cancelled"; the reservation disappears from occupancy counts on the Calendar.

Cancelling requires the reservation → cancel permission, which is separate from the write permission so it can be limited to supervisors.

Mark a no-show

What happens:

• Status becomes No Show.
• Inventory is released for every room. Unlike a cancellation, a missing inventory row is tolerated so a no-show can always be recorded.
• Folio: the stay is reversed and the no-show fee is posted.
• Channels: an availability update is queued. The no-show itself is reported to the OTA only when that channel is switched on under Report no-shows to the channel on the Stay Rules settings tab — "Tells the OTA the guest never came, so its own no-show rules apply and the booking is not paid out as a stay. Channels not ticked are marked here only." Booking.com is the only channel Channex accepts a no-show report for; everything else is marked in Innvera only, and the OTA's own rules still run on their side.
• Housekeeping arrival-prep tasks are cancelled; notification "Guest no-show".

Mark no-shows automatically

Rather than remembering to do it, switch on Mark no-shows automatically on Stay Rules: "Every confirmed arrival still not checked in is marked as a no-show the morning after, at the time below (property clock). Inventory is released and the fee above is posted." Set the time next to At.

The sweep runs through exactly the same action the desk uses, so the fee, the inventory release and the channel report all behave identically. Two rules keep it safe:

• Never a guest due today. Only arrival days strictly before the property's current date are swept — a guest arriving at 23:50 is late, not absent.
• Never more than a week back. Arrivals older than seven days are left alone, so switching the setting on does not mark a month of history overnight.

A booking that was checked in, cancelled or already marked in the meantime is skipped.

Fees and the folio

Cancelling, marking a no-show and releasing a hold all settle the folio the same way:

1. The stay is reversed, line by line. Every room charge, tax and re-pricing adjustment posted when the booking was made gets a matching negative line — "Cancelled: Room charge — …", "No-show: Tax — …", "Hold released: …" — so revenue, the tax liability and the tax return stop counting a night nobody stayed. The ledger is append-only, so nothing is edited or deleted.
2. The fee goes on in their place, as a single Cancellation Fee or No-show Fee line that names the rule which produced it — the cancellation tier's own name ("Cancellation fee (Standard rate policy)") or, where the property set its own no-show rule, "No-show fee (no-show policy)".
3. Payments and deposits are left alone. They settle the fee, and anything left over shows as a credit for you to refund. Extras the desk posted by hand — a transfer already taken, say — also stay, because they were consumed whether or not the room was.

The folio stays open, so you can still refund a deposit or post a write-off.

What the cancellation fee is

A cancellation is charged off the default tier of the property's cancellation policy, and only when the cancellation falls inside that tier's window — fewer than its hours before arrival before the guest was due (the arrival date at the property's check-in time, on the property's clock). Cancel earlier than that and nothing is charged. The tier's charge can be a first night, a percentage of the stay or the full stay, and the fee never exceeds the stay it replaces. A property with no readable cancellation policy charges nothing. See Policies.

What the no-show fee is

A no-show has its own setting — Fee under No-show on the Stay Rules tab:

Whatever the basis, the fee is capped at the stay price.

Channel cancellations

An OTA cancellation normally arrives as a channel revision and cancels the reservation in Innvera without staff action. There, the property's cancellation policy does not apply — whatever the guest owes is between them and the OTA — so no fee is posted, and any prepayment the channel said it had collected is reversed along with the stay it paid for. Payments your own desk took are left in place: that is money the property actually holds, and refunding it is a person's decision.

If a guest asks the front desk to cancel a channel booking, prefer cancelling on the OTA side so the guest's confirmation, the OTA's cancellation policy and Innvera all agree. Cancelling in Innvera alone releases your inventory but does not tell the OTA.

Common mistakes

• Using No Show for a guest who called to cancel. That charges the no-show fee and, where the channel is switched on, tells the OTA the guest never came. Use Cancel.
• Using Cancel on a tentative booking. The status chip offers Release Hold instead, and it is the right action: no fee, and the audit trail says the hold lapsed rather than that the guest cancelled.
• Cancelling to change dates. A cancelled booking is gone, and it may have earned a fee. Move it on the Calendar instead.
• Forgetting the credit. Where a deposit was larger than the fee, the folio is left in credit — refund it from the Folio tab rather than leaving it to show up in reports.

Related

• Statuses and Lifecycle
• Property Settings
• Policies
• Billing & Accounting