How to Issue a Custom Refund

In the Good Sam Booking platform, you're able to set a cancellation fee, but you aren't held to that cancellation fee when making a refund. Every refund you make you will be given the option of issuing no refund, a full refund, or a custom refund. While it's important to have a clear cancellation policy, we understand that there will sometimes be outlier situations with cancellations and refunds and we want to make sure to accommodate any situation that may arise.

Getting Started: To issue a custom refund, you must first locate the reservation that you're looking to issue the refund towards and open up the reservations edit screen. There are two ways to locate a reservation and navigate to its edit screen:

1. If you know the specific site name and date range of the stay, you can look through the reservation dashboard for the reservation and, once located, hover over the "i", then click the pencil icon in the pop-up window and you'll be in the edit settings. The image below illustrates these steps.

2. You can locate the reservation in the "Reservations" tab on the left side of the screen. You'll want to search for the guest in the search box at the top. If this guest has multiple reservations you will want to be sure the site and reservation dates match the reservation you're looking to perform the refund for. Once you've located the correct reservation, either double click it or click the three vertical dots on the right side and select "Edit" from the pop-up window.

Note: It's important to make sure that the reservation's dates fall within the date range selected in the reservations tab.

Now that you've located the reservation in question and are in the edit settings, regardless of how you got there, the process moving forward will be the same. Click into the "Payment" tab towards the top of the window and select the "Refund" button just below and to the right. Once selected, this will bring a pop-up window that will ask you to choose a Refund Type, for this example we'll choose Custom Refund. When you select Custom Refund, a Refund Amount box will appear - enter in the amount you would like to refund the guest, add in a note describing the refund situation, and select "Refund".

"Close this Invoice?": If you uncheck this box, the refund will be posted, but the invoice will remain open and show the amount refunded as still due. If this box is checked, it will log the refunded amount and the invoice will show as closed out.

Note: The Good Sam Booking platform will ONLY automatically refund payments made through Stripe. Payments logged with any other Payment Type will be the responsibility of the campground to refund (To learn more about Payment Types, click here). If multiple payment types are used, the system will default to the first payment type when issuing a refund, thus if the first payment was made with cash, but the second through Stripe it will be the responsibility of the campground to refund.

Once the refund has been issued, it will show in the invoice as follows: