Know the Cancellation Fee Before You Press Cancel
A confirm box that warns of fees without saying how much asks people to press a button blindfolded.
In the customer portal’s booking detail, the cancel dialog shows a real cancellation quote: the charge, the refund, and the time until which that fee applies. It reads the cancellation policy saved when the booking was confirmed, and the actual refund runs through the same calculation.
The cancel dialog used to warn, in general terms, that fees might apply. Customers pressed cancel first and read the refund afterwards. For an agency that has to answer a traveller, that is a blind step: the guest asks how much they lose if they cancel now, and the honest answer was “we will know once we cancel”.
Cancellation policies come in tiers: free before a certain time, a partial charge after it, nothing back later still. A supplier’s policy can also change after the booking is confirmed. A dialog with its own estimate would sooner or later disagree with the real refund, and a wrong quote is worse than none.
The quote reads only the cancellation policy saved when the booking was confirmed, never a fresh check with the supplier, and the real refund uses the same calculation: quote and refund are one sum worked out at two moments. The dialog lists the contractual penalty, the refund to the buyer, the refund mode, the deadline for that fee and when the quote was made. With no saved policy, an ambiguous policy or mismatched currencies, it gives no quote rather than a guess.
A missing quote does not mean free cancellation. In that case the dialog says fees and refunds follow the actual cancellation result, and shows no amount at all. In most cases, as long as you cancel before the deadline shown, the figure you see is the refund you get. The deadline is shown in the tenant’s time zone, with the zone labelled.