Auto payments: Best practices

Auto payments will automatically recalculate if the reservation's total payout changes due to changes made on the booking channel. However, if you perform any of the following manual actions on the reservation, auto payments will never again recalculate, and you could end up undercharging or overcharging the guest. If you do perform any of these actions, check if you need to edit the remaining auto payments:

• Add a payment manually (not through auto payments), even if it is scheduled to be collected in the future.
• Add an authorization hold manually (not through auto payments).
• Manually collect an auto payment before it was scheduled to be charged automatically.
• Edit or cancel a specific auto payment on a reservation (not the entire auto payment template).
• Edit or cancel a specific authorization hold on a reservation (not the entire auto payment template).

When setting up more than one auto payment rule for a listing, set the final rule as "charge rest of payment" rather than a percentage of the payment. If the reservation total is altered after the first guest payment is made and no manual changes were made (see Limit manual payment actions above) the remaining amount will be accounted for by the auto payment rule, and your guest will not be undercharged or overcharged.

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.

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 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.

• 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.

Set notifications for your payments and always be informed in real-time of failed payments, refunds, overcharged payment, and more.

Auto Payments are currently only supported on the listing level. However as a workaround, if you need to update a specific auto payment on a reservation, you can go ahead and cancel it.