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Haven cancellation policies are built from stacked refund tiers — an ordered list of rules you control, instead of a single fixed preset. This lets you match anything from a simple "full refund up to 7 days out" to a layered Airbnb- or Hospitable-style policy with mid-stay protection.
Each tier is one rule: a refund percentage, the window it applies to, and a few optional settings. When a guest cancels, Haven walks your tiers from the most generous (earliest) to the least and pays out the first tier that matches how far ahead of check-in the cancellation happened. If no tier matches, the booking is non-refundable (after the grace period).
You read a policy as a set of windows. For example, two tiers — 100% if cancelled 14+ days before check-in and 50% if cancelled 7+ days before check-in — read as:
The "No refund" window at the bottom is implicit — it covers any time closer than your lowest tier.
Any tier can require that the booking was made at least N days before check-in for that tier to apply. This is how you say "100% refund — but only if the guest booked at least 7 days in advance," so a last-minute booker doesn't get your most generous tier. Leave it empty for the tier to always apply.
For longer stays you can add a tier that also applies once the stay has started. Instead of a percentage of the whole booking, a mid-stay tier refunds a percentage of the unspent nights — the nights the guest has not yet used — and can charge a penalty of one or more nights first.
This matches the Airbnb-style long-stay rule: "Guests who cancel within 5 days of check-in or during their trip are charged 1 extra night and refunded 50% of the unspent nights."
How a mid-stay refund is calculated:
Taxes on mid-stay refunds: Haven refunds the tax that was collected on the nightly portion being refunded, drawn from the booking's frozen tax breakdown. Tax on the cleaning fee and other one-time fees is not refunded mid-stay, because those are treated as already consumed once the stay begins.
A mid-stay tier is always the last tier in your policy (the lowest "days before check-in"), since it covers the tail end and the in-stay period.
You don't have to build tiers from scratch. The Start from a template… menu in the editor seeds common shapes you can then fine-tune:
Templates only seed the tiers — once you edit them, your tiers are the source of truth, and Haven shows a derived label (Flexible, Moderate, Strict, Super strict, or Custom) automatically.
Not sure where to land? Use Help me decide in the Cancellation policy section to open the cancellation coach. Answer a few questions about your market, how far ahead guests book, and your refund comfort, and it recommends a full tier list (including a mid-stay tier when it makes sense) that you can apply with one click.
All bookings on Haven include a 24-hour cancellation grace period. This is a platform-enforced policy that applies to every booking, regardless of the host's chosen cancellation policy.
Example: A guest books a property at 2:00 PM on Monday. They have until 2:00 PM on Tuesday to cancel and receive their refund (minus the processing fee). After that, the host's cancellation policy (Flexible, Moderate, Strict, or Super Strict) determines the refund amount.
When a payment is processed, Stripe (our payment processor) charges a non-refundable processing fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. This fee is not returned when a refund is issued.
| Booking Amount | Processing Fee | Guest Refund (100% policy) |
|---|---|---|
| $500 | $14.80 | $485.20 |
| $1,000 | $29.30 | $970.70 |
| $2,000 | $58.30 | $1,941.70 |
When you cancel a booking (rather than the guest), the guest always receives a full refund and you absorb the processing fee. The refund tiers above only govern guest-initiated cancellations after the grace period.
Your tiers are frozen onto each booking at the time it's confirmed. Editing your policy later only affects future bookings — every existing reservation keeps the exact policy it was booked under, so a guest's refund is always calculated from the terms they agreed to.
If your listing is synced from a connected channel manager, your cancellation policy is imported from that partner and the field stays locked to keep the two in sync — the tiers you see are derived from the synced policy. To edit the tiers in Haven, use Edit in Haven on the field to unlock it and set your own — see the in-app message on that section for details.
A guest who wants different dates or a different party size doesn't have to cancel. You can change a confirmed booking in place from the reservation — see Modify a Reservation.
This matters for your policy, because modifying and cancelling settle money very differently:
So if a guest asks to move their stay by a few days, modify it. Reserve cancellation for a stay that isn't happening.
Guests cannot modify their own reservations. They message you and you make the change, which keeps the decision — and your calendar — yours.
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