Held bookings and expired holds
When someone books through your website and there's money to pay by card, their dates are held for 30 minutes while they complete payment. If they pay, the booking confirms as normal. If they walk away, the hold expires by itself and those nights go straight back on sale — on your own site and on every connected channel.
Before this existed, an abandoned checkout blocked its dates indefinitely. Nothing released it, so the nights sat unsellable until someone noticed and cancelled the booking by hand.
What a hold looks like
A held booking appears in your bookings list as Draft, exactly like any other unpaid booking. It genuinely occupies its nights while the hold is live: nobody else can book that room for those dates, including through an OTA.
Once a hold expires, the booking's status becomes Expired. That's a permanent record — the booking stays in your list so you can see the enquiry happened — but the nights are free again.
Expired is deliberately not the same as Cancelled. A cancellation is a real booking that was called off; an expired hold is a checkout nobody finished. Keeping them apart means your cancellation figures stay meaningful, and the count of expired holds tells you something useful on its own: if it's climbing, your deposit terms may be putting guests off at the payment step.
You'll see expired holds as their own segment on the dashboard's booking-status breakdown.
Which bookings get a hold
Only bookings made by a guest through your website or booking widget, and only when there's an outstanding balance payable by card.
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| Guest owes money, card payment available | Held for 30 minutes |
| Guest chooses bank transfer | No hold — see below |
| You only offer bank transfer | No hold |
| Nothing left to pay | Confirmed immediately |
| You take no online payments at all | Confirmed immediately |
| You entered the booking yourself | Never held |
| Booking arrived from an OTA | Never held |
Bank transfer is never put on a clock
A bank transfer takes days to arrive, so a 30-minute deadline would expire every single one before the money could physically land. If a guest picks bank transfer — or if bank transfer is the only method you offer — the booking simply stays Draft with no deadline at all, and you release it yourself if the transfer never comes.
What the guest sees
They can pick up where they left off. If a guest closes the tab and comes back to your site while their hold is still live, a banner at the top of the booking panel shows their dates, their booking reference, how many minutes are left and a Finish paying button.
They get emailed. Two messages, both on by default and both editable:
- Booking not finished — sent about 10 minutes in, with a link back to the payment page.
- Held dates released — sent when the hold expires. It makes clear that nothing was charged and invites them to book again.
Edit or switch either off under Settings → Scheduled messages, like any other automated email — see Automated & scheduled messages. They're sent only for website bookings, so a guest you booked in yourself will never receive one.
A guest can only hold one booking at a time. If they submit the booking form again from the same browser, their previous hold is released first. This is also what stops anyone tying up your whole calendar by submitting the booking form over and over.
Releasing a hold yourself
You don't normally need to. Holds clear themselves within a minute of expiring.
If you want the dates back sooner, cancel the booking as you would any other — see Managing a booking. That releases the nights immediately, everywhere.
If a guest pays after their hold expired
They can't. Once a hold has expired, the payment page refuses payment and explains that the hold ran out, because those nights may already belong to somebody else. If the guest still wants the stay, they book again.
In the rare case where a card payment lands anyway — a slow bank authorising a payment started before the deadline — the payment is recorded against the expired booking so you can see it and refund it. The booking is not resurrected, because its nights may well have been re-sold in the meantime.