Deposits, holds and cancellations: what an agent needs to know.

A hold is not a booking

A guest's AI agent is booking a week at your small group of holiday cottages for October half term. Three numbers need to be exactly right for that booking to be represented honestly: what's held now, what's still owed, and what happens if the plan changes. A person doing this reads "£100 deposit, balance due four weeks before, free cancellation up to two weeks out" and holds all three facts loosely in their head, checking again nearer the time if it matters. An agent reporting back to its person needs to state all three precisely and correctly the first time, because it's the one telling someone what they've committed to.

The three don't just need to be correct individually. They need to be correct together, at the moment they're stated, because a person planning half term around that cottage is making other decisions, when to book time off, whether to invite grandparents for one of the nights, based on what the agent tells them is true. A wrong deposit figure or a misstated cancellation date doesn't just cause an awkward phone call later. It can shape a decision that was never really theirs to get wrong.

Some systems let an agent place a temporary hold, a cottage reserved for a short window without payment, before the booking is confirmed. If an agent can't tell the difference between a hold and a confirmed booking, it risks telling its person "you're booked" when what's happened is a reservation that expires in twenty minutes unless something else happens. Stated wrongly, that's exactly the kind of confident error this hub keeps warning against: a sentence that sounds settled when nothing is settled yet.

A deposit is a partial commitment

Telling someone "it's £600 for the week" when £100 has been taken as a deposit and £500 is still due closer to the date is a different sentence from "you owe £100 now." An agent that collapses the two figures into one has misrepresented what's been paid, which the cottage owner then has to sort out with a confused or frustrated guest weeks later, usually at the worst possible moment, the week of arrival.

Cancellation terms need dates and numbers

"Flexible" and "free cancellation" are words, not terms. An agent needs the structure underneath them: cancel by this date for this refund, a smaller amount after that date, nothing refundable inside a final window. Written as a sentence, a person picks up the gist and moves on. Written as a fact, with dates and figures attached, an agent can state it correctly and act on it if a cancellation is ever requested through it, rather than guessing at what "flexible" was supposed to mean.

Getting all three stated as precise, dated, numbered facts, rather than reassuring phrases, is what lets an agent represent a booking accurately instead of approximately. A guest who's told the wrong figure once tends to remember it longer than they remember the stay itself.

Turning a booking's real terms into structured, checkable facts, rather than sentences an agent has to interpret and hope it got right, is exactly the layer Selfe builds.

Do we need to change our actual cancellation policy for this?

No, the policy itself doesn't need to change. It needs to be stated as structured, dated facts somewhere an agent can check, rather than only as prose on a policy page.

What happens if an agent gets one of these wrong anyway?

The same thing that happens when a person misreads a policy: a confused guest and a conversation the business has to have. The difference is scale, one confused guest becomes a pattern once agents are booking regularly on people's behalf.