Auto Payments allow you to set payment policies per listing and collect guest payments automatically.
Our suggested best practices can help optimize the setup of your Auto Payment rules and provide valuable information about scenarios relevant to your business. See the information below.
Avoid payment discrepancies
Prevent charging a guest incorrectly
When setting up more than one Auto Payment rule for a listing, set the final rule as "collect rest of payment" rather than a percentage of the payment. If the reservation total is altered after the first guest payment is made, the entire remaining amount will be accounted for by the Auto Payment rule, and your guest will not be undercharged or overcharged.
Prevent duplicate payments
If an Auto Payment is not approved on the first attempt, Guesty will attempt it two more times, in one-hour intervals, for up to three total attempts in the span of two hours. If all three attempts fail, the payment will transition from "Pending" to "Failed".
To prevent duplicate payments, do not attempt to manually collect the payment during this two-hour process. If you do want to collect manually, cancel the pending Auto Payment first.
Avoid guest disputes
Help guests understand what they will be paying for
Your listings should clearly state or describe any additional fees that are applied by default to the reservation. If you are using Guesty's rental agreements feature, you could add this information to the agreement.
Help guests anticipate potential payment issues
Inform guests that payments may be taken in separate transactions, even if they’re charged at the same time. Listings often have more than one Auto Payment rule, and since they are set to a time relative to confirmation, check-in, or check-out, they could end up getting charged on the same date, but separately. If you are using Guesty's rental agreement feature, you could add this information to the agreement.
Maintain your financial interests
Ensure you receive the funds you are owed
- Schedule the Auto Payments to have 100% of payment taken by the time of check-in, to prevent guests from leaving the property without paying the full amount.
- Schedule an authorization hold for shortly after confirmation, to validate that there are sufficient funds on the guest's credit card. The hold can be released even an hour later.
- Schedule an authorization hold no more than 7 days before check-out, to act as a damage deposit. The hold expires automatically and the guest's funds are released after 7 days. Your damage-deposit hold will expire after check-out, so you can collect the necessary funds if damages are discovered.
