Easy way to cancel your hotel room booking

The hotel room has been booked already, but all of sudden, your travel plan change. 

You will need to cancel your hotel room booking and are not sure how to do it.

Don’t rush to cancel your hotel room booking without checking the terms and conditions informed during the reservation or stated in the confirmation letter.

In this writing, I want to highlight some general points for you to consider before doing the cancellation of your hotel room booking aiming to make the process becomes easier.

1. Check what type of room rates that you have booked

• Normal rate or known as Best Available Rate. This type of rate has a flexibility allowing you to cancel anytime.
• Member rate.  Member rates will have several different cancellation policies, it can be flexible or with restriction. Therefore, you will need to check the terms and conditions to make sure on this.
• Promotional rate.  There are many promotion terms used by the hotel, such as, Advance Purchase, Early Bird, Special Deal, Flash Sale and the recent common promotion is Book Now, Stay Later.  Promotional rate will offer more competitive and attractive rate, but then, it will come with several restrictions including the cancellation policy, such as, non-cancellation or cancellation with charge.

2. Check the process to refund the payment

• Payment for room reservation with normal rate (Best Available Rate) or flexible member rate can be done usually upon check in. Therefore, no refund required when the booking is cancelled.
• This is different with room reservation using promotional rate.  Payment must usually be settled during reservation with non-refundable policy.  This means when you cancel the booking, the payment will be forfeited.

 3. Check how the reservation was originally made

• Do you call or email the hotel directly to book the room?
• Do you book the room through the hotel website?
• Do you book the room via 3^rd party, such as, travel agent, online travel agent?

For easy process, you will need to cancel the room booking the same way as you do the room reservation.

4. Confirmation numbers

Mention or input the confirmation numbers as stated in the confirmation letter when you cancel the booking to speed up the process.

5. Cancellation confirmation

Do request to the hotel to send you the letter of cancellation confirmation for your supported document.

Hope this information will be useful for you.

By the way, the pictures in this writing were taken when I traveled to Dubai and the other one is the beautiful garden of my holiday home in Lembang, West Java.

Have a wonderful day.