Booking discounts
A discount reduces what a guest owes on a single booking — a returning-guest gesture, a long-stay reduction, a goodwill adjustment after a problem. It is set per booking, so it never changes your rates or your other bookings.
Add a discount while creating the booking
If you already know the discount — you agreed it on the phone, or you are recording a returning guest — set it as you take the booking:
- Bookings → New Booking, and fill in the property, guest and dates as usual.
- Below Notes, choose Add a discount.
- Pick Fixed Amount or Percentage (%).
- Choose what the discount applies to — see Choosing what the discount covers below. The default, Whole booking, behaves the way discounts always have. Then enter the figure. A percentage is worked out against whatever you chose here, not always the full booking.
- Add a short description — this is the reason the guest reads, so write it for them ("Returning guest", "Long-stay reduction"), not for your own notes.
- The Pricing Summary on the right immediately shows a Discount line and the reduced Grand Total, so you can check the figure before you save.
- Create Booking.
Choosing Remove clears the discount completely — it does not just hide the fields, so a figure you have cancelled is never saved by accident.
Setting the discount here rather than afterwards also means the booking's payment schedule — its deposit and balance — is sized against the discounted total from the start.
Only staff can apply a discount. Guests booking through your public website or an embedded booking widget cannot, however the request reaches us.
Apply or change a discount on an existing booking
- Open the booking from Bookings → View.
- On the Overview tab, open the More menu in the header and choose Adjust Discount.
- Choose a fixed amount or a percentage and what it applies to, then enter the discount with a description, exactly as above.
- Save. The booking's financials recalculate immediately.
To remove a discount, set the amount to zero.
A percentage is saved as a fixed amount. When you save, Stayant works out what the percentage comes to and stores that figure. If the booking's value changes afterwards — new dates, a charge or extra added or removed — the discount stays at that amount rather than re-applying the percentage. Open Adjust Discount again if you want it re-worked against the new total.
Choosing what the discount covers
A booking is made up of three kinds of money: the accommodation, any charges (cleaning, a service charge) and any extras the guest has bought. Applies to decides which of them the discount comes off:
| Applies to | The discount comes off | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Whole booking | Accommodation, charges and extras | A flat goodwill gesture across the whole stay. The default. |
| Accommodation & charges | Accommodation and charges, not extras | You are discounting the stay itself but the extras are bought-in items you still need to recover. |
| Accommodation only | The accommodation | "10% off the room" — the most common case. |
This matters most with a percentage. On a £600 stay with £200 of extras, 10% is £60 on Accommodation only but £80 on Whole booking, because the extras are part of what is being discounted.
It also caps a fixed amount. A £700 discount set to Accommodation only on a £600 stay takes £600, leaving the extras at full price — it does not spill over onto them.
If you have been adding extras after setting the discount, you no longer need to. That was a way of stopping the discount from growing to cover the extras, and choosing Accommodation only now does it properly, in whatever order you work. Bookings you already took this way are unchanged.
Discounting a single extra
You can also reduce one extra on its own, without touching the stay or the other extras — a goodwill discount on an airport transfer, say.
- Open the booking and find the extra in the Extras section of the Charges and extras card.
- Choose Edit on that row.
- Enter the discount for that line and Save.
The extra keeps showing its full price with the discount beneath it, so you and the guest can both see what was originally quoted and what was taken off.
If a booking has both, the extra's own discount is applied first and the booking discount then works on what is left, so the same money is never discounted twice.
How the discount affects the total
The discount comes off whatever you chose in Applies to, and any sales tax is then reduced in proportion to the taxable part of that — so a discount reduces the tax the guest pays too, but only on the lines it actually covers. An extra outside the discount still pays tax on its full price. Every screen, email, invoice and export reads that same calculated total; nothing works it out separately, so the figures always agree.
A discount larger than what it applies to is capped at that amount rather than going negative or reaching lines outside it.
Where the guest sees it
Once a discount is set, it appears as a Discount — <your description> line against a negative amount everywhere the guest is shown money:
- the booking confirmation email
- the booking updated email sent after a modification
- the payment request email carrying a payment link
- the invoice email and the PDF invoice
- the guest portal
An extra with its own discount shows as its full price with a separate discount line beneath it, in the same places. The guest is never shown which lines a booking discount applies to — just the discount and its description.
With no discount on the booking, none of these show a discount line at all — a zero discount is never printed.
Your own Overview tab shows the same line in the booking's financial breakdown — as does the Pricing Summary on the create form before the booking is saved — and the bookings CSV export (Reports → Export CSV) carries Discount and Discount Description columns alongside a grand total that is already net of the discount.
Referring to a discount in your own messages
Scheduled messages and message templates can quote the discount with two placeholders:
| Placeholder | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
{{Discount}} |
The discount, signed. Blank when there is none. | -£50.00 |
{{DiscountDescription}} |
The reason you typed. Blank when there is none. | Returning guest |
Because both are blank when the booking has no discount, wrap them in a conditional block so the sentence disappears entirely rather than reading oddly:
{{#if Discount}}Includes a discount of {{Discount}} — {{DiscountDescription}}.{{/if}}
See Message templates for the full placeholder list and how {{#if}} blocks work.