Setting Your Deposit and Cancellation Policy

Every retreat on Finding Retreats has a deposit and a cancellation policy attached to it, set in the Booking Conditions section of your listing editor. Together they decide how much a guest pays up front, and what happens if their plans change.

Setting your deposit

The deposit is the percentage of the total price a guest pays to secure their booking, with the remainder due later. The minimum deposit is 30 percent, and you can set it anywhere from there up to a full 100 percent if you want guests to pay in full at the time of booking. Your account has a default deposit percentage, set on the Conditions page, that pre-fills new retreats, but each retreat's own Booking Conditions section can override that default.

Alongside the deposit, you choose when the remaining balance is due. The options run from full payment at booking, through 60, 30, 14, or 7 days before the retreat starts, to payment on arrival. Whichever you pick applies to every guest who books that retreat.

Choosing a cancellation policy tier

Four policy tiers are available, each defined by two windows before the retreat's start date: a full-refund window, and a partial-refund window that pays back 50 percent.

• Relaxed: full refund up to 7 days before, 50 percent refund from 2 to 6 days before
• Flexible: full refund up to 14 days before, 50 percent refund from 7 to 13 days before
• Moderate: full refund up to 30 days before, 50 percent refund from 14 to 29 days before
• Strict: full refund up to 60 days before, 50 percent refund from 30 to 59 days before

Outside of a tier's partial-refund window, a cancellation isn't eligible for a refund at all. The deposit itself always follows whichever refund policy you've chosen — there's no separate, always-non-refundable portion.

Transfer and credit alternatives

Beyond the refund tiers, you can independently turn on two alternatives to a straight cancellation:

• Allow a guest to transfer their booking to someone else, rather than cancelling it outright
• Offer a credit instead of a refund, valid for either 6 or 12 months, for a guest to use on a future booking

Both are optional and sit alongside your refund tiers rather than replacing them — a guest outside the refund window might still have the option to transfer or take a credit, even with no cash refund available.

Where to set this up

Your account-level default lives on the Conditions page, and applies to new retreats until you change it there. Each individual retreat's Booking Conditions section shows a live preview of the policy as guests will see it — full refund window, partial refund window, and deposit terms — so you can check the wording before publishing rather than guessing how it reads.

Related help

For the exact screens to set deposits and structure a payment plan, see "Deposits, balance, and payment plans" and "Set base pricing" in the Help Centre. For choosing between the specific tiers, see "Choose a cancellation policy" and "Custom cancellation policies."