Booking settings

Booking behaviour is configured under Settings → Booking settings (the gear icon). This page controls how incoming bookings are handled, your default check-in/out times and booking window, and the booking summary PDF. Each card saves on its own.

How your business runs

The first card on the page asks the whole question in one place: how your business runs. Three models, each shown as the journey a booking actually takes under it — the same wording you see in What happens to a booking below.

Request & offer — guests ask, you answer with an offer, and money is only collected once you confirm. The classic agency and holiday-let arrangement.
Instant booking, you confirm — your storefront takes bookings around the clock, but each one still waits for your decision. This is what a plain “instant” booking does when auto-confirm is off, so it is worth choosing on purpose rather than arriving at by accident.
Instant booking, confirmed — booked, confirmed and payable without you.

Picking a model shows what this changes before anything is saved, one line per setting. Two of those changes are worth reading closely:

Anything marked Payment settings changes when guests may pay, which lives under When you collect. Choosing a model where you vet each booking sets payment to open only once you confirm — asking for money before you have decided is what produces avoidable refunds.
If you have never set a payment-collection rule, applying a model creates one, and that rule then governs every payment method rather than each one following its own timing. The card says so before you apply.

A model is a starting point, not a lock. Every individual setting below stays editable afterwards; the card then shows which model you are on and how many settings you have since changed. Changing your booking flow after your terms and conditions page has been generated does not rewrite that page — the card warns you, and you regenerate or edit the passage yourself.

Booking settings

The main card controls how bookings move through their lifecycle.

Booking flow — Request to Book (the default): incoming bookings start as pending and wait for you to confirm or decline them. Instant Booking is the direct-confirm alternative.
Auto-confirm bookings — when on, bookings skip the pending state and are confirmed immediately when published. Leave it off to review every request by hand.
Auto-Publish on Guest Acceptance — when on, a guest accepting an offer on their guest offer page automatically publishes the request as a booking (availability is re-checked first; on a conflict, or if the request is missing required guest details, it stays Customer Confirmed for you to resolve by hand). Off by default — every acceptance then waits for you to publish manually. If a guest’s postal address is still incomplete when you send an offer, the send dialog flags in advance that an acceptance will need manual publishing under this setting. See Requests and offers for the full guest-acceptance flow.
Default offer validity (days) — how long a sent offer stays open by default (1–90 days, initially 7). Prefills the Valid for (days) field in the send-offer dialogs; you can still adjust it for each individual send. Offers past their validity expire automatically.
Default cancellation policy — the policy applied to any listing that doesn’t have its own. See Cancellations and refunds.
Pending bookings block storefront — when on (the default), a pending booking blocks those dates on the storefront: search hides the listing, the public calendar shows them unavailable, and overlapping checkouts are rejected. When off, the storefront ignores pending bookings and keeps taking new ones for those dates. Either way, the operator console always treats pending bookings as blocking.
Auto-complete bookings — when on (the default), a confirmed booking is automatically marked completed a set number of days after check-out. Turn it off to require manual close-out for every stay.
Days after checkout — how many days past check-out before the auto-complete runs (only shown when auto-complete is on).
Guest registration (Meldeschein) and Registration countries — enable and scope statutory guest registration. See Guest registration.

Timing

Booking calendar window — how far ahead guests can book, entered as years and months. Dates beyond this window are unavailable.
Default check-in time and Default check-out time — the times shown on bookings, emails, and PDFs unless a booking overrides them.
Send arrival information before check-in and Days before arrival — emails every confirmed guest their directions, handover contact and check-in time a few days before they travel. Off unless you switch it on; see Before the guest arrives.

Booking summary templates

Design the booking summary PDF that guests receive. The block editor lets you combine rich-text blocks with a booking price summary block (which inserts the price tables) and page breaks. Insert booking variables by typing $, and use Preview PDF to see the result before saving.

Other cards on this page

The Booking settings page also carries a few adjacent settings that affect bookings:

Pets — whether pets are allowed by default and the default pet fee (can be overridden per listing).
Guest categories — age thresholds for children and infants, and which children stay free.
Customer booking view — shown only when Settings → Storefront mode is set to Custom (running your own storefront rather than Reynt’s built-in one): your storefront’s base URL, plus path overrides for the customer-facing booking page and the guest offer page. If the offer page URL is left blank, proposal emails simply omit the accept/decline button (guests reply by email instead) — set it once your custom site has an offer page. The section also holds the custom status messages shown on the booking page (pending / confirmed / cancelled). On the built-in storefront (the default) both pages exist automatically and neither path needs configuring.

Booking reference prefixes and numbering live under Invoices → creation and numbering; payment charge timing lives under Payments.