Important:
The legacy auto payments feature will be discontinued soon. Switch to the new payment automations for a more flexible and powerful way to manage payment schedules.
Auto payments allow you to set payment policies per listing and collect guest payments automatically. Use the best practices below to optimize your setup, prevent payment discrepancies, and handle specific booking scenarios effectively.
Learn more about rate plans and how to increase occupancy and revenue, and provide our recommended setup if you're using auto payments.
Important:
Auto payments are created only when a reservation status is "Confirmed".
Avoid payment discrepancies
Limit manual payment actions
Auto payments recalculate automatically if the total payout changes on the booking channel. However, manual changes stop this recalculation, which may result in incorrect charges. If you perform any of the actions below, check that the remaining auto payments are correct:
- Adding a payment manually (not through auto payments), even if scheduled for future collection.
- Adding an authorization hold manually (not through auto payments).
- Collecting an auto payment manually before the scheduled date.
- Editing or canceling a specific auto payment on a reservation (not the auto payment template).
- Editing or canceling a specific authorization hold on a reservation (not the auto payment template).
Prevent incorrect charges
When setting up multiple auto payment rules for a listing, set the final rule as "charge rest of payment" rather than a percentage. If the reservation total is changed after the first guest payment is made and no manual changes were made, the auto payment rule adjusts automatically to charge the correct amount.
Important:
After setting the initial rule, you can set only one condition for "rest of the payment". The remaining balance is charged based on the second rule.
Prevent duplicate payments
If an auto payment is not approved on the first attempt, Guesty retries twice in one-hour intervals (three attempts total over two hours). If all attempts fail, the payment status changes from "Pending" to "Failed".
To prevent duplicate payments, don't collect payment manually during this two-hour process. To collect manually, cancel the pending auto payment first.
Avoid guest disputes
Clarify payments for guests
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.
Inform guests about transaction timing
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.
Protect your revenue
Secure full payment
- Schedule the auto payments to collect 100% of the payment before check-in, to prevent guests from leaving the property without paying the full amount.
- Schedule an authorization hold 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. If no damages occur, the hold expires automatically after 7 days, so you can collect the necessary funds if damages are discovered.
Track payment status
Set payment notifications to stay informed about failed payments, refunds, overcharges, and more.
Manage payments
Update specific reservations
Auto payments are set per listing. To update a specific auto payment on a reservation, cancel the scheduled payment.