You can decide between taking Deposits or Cancelation Fee with reservations.
First you need to connect your Stripe account with Hostme in the Admin panel
-> Reservations -> Deposits and Fees.
You should Enable charge and decide on the currency.
You should decide on the group size and set up the amount that you would like
to charge.
After that you can decide between one of the two options:
Deposit
Customers will be asked to leave their credit card details before making a reservation and the amount would be reduced from their account immediately.
Cancelation Fee
Customers will be asked to leave their credit card details before making a reservation, but the amount won't be charged until certain time (for example 24 hours prior to the reservation - depending on the settings).
Refund is only charged manually.
In case of deposit being paid already, after the customer cancels reservation, they need to call the restaurant and ask for refund. They don't get refund automatically.
Host needs to refund the customer (click on certain reservation -> three dots next to Edit -> Refund).
In case of restaurant rejecting reservation (when Manual approval is enabled) and the deposit has already been paid, host needs to refund the amount manually (click on certain reservation -> three dots next to Edit -> Refund).
After that, host can reject the reservation.
If the host wants to cancel the reservation without charging the cancellation fee, please follow instructions from this article.