How to Take a Deposit on a Direct Booking

Why a deposit is the whole game

When you take bookings through a channel, payment is somebody else’s problem. Go direct and it becomes the central design decision of your business — and the deposit is where it’s decided.

A deposit does three jobs at once. It filters out people who aren’t serious. It gives you working capital months before the stay. And — the one people underrate — it is the only thing that makes your cancellation policy enforceable. A policy saying the full amount is due inside thirty days is worth exactly nothing if you’re holding none of the guest’s money and none of their card details.

So: how much, when, and what happens in between.

How much to ask for

There’s no universal number, but there is a sensible way to reason about it.

25–30% is the common default, and it works for most stays. It’s enough that a guest thinks twice before cancelling, small enough that it doesn’t feel like you’re asking for the holiday up front.

Push it higher when your dates are hard to re-let. A remote lodge booking eight months out is carrying real risk on your side, and 50% is defensible. Push it lower — or take the full amount — when the stay is close: at two weeks out, splitting the payment creates admin for a balance that falls due almost immediately.

Two things worth getting right whatever number you pick:

Charge the deposit as a percentage of the total, not a flat fee. A flat £200 is a serious commitment on a £400 weekend and a rounding error on a £4,000 fortnight.

Decide explicitly whether it’s refundable, and write it down. “Deposit non-refundable, balance refunded in full if cancelled more than 60 days out” is a complete, comprehensible sentence that prevents an argument later.

When the balance falls due

The standard is a number of days before arrival — 30 is the most common, 60 for high-value or hard-to-re-let stays.

Work it backwards from a question nobody asks: if the balance doesn’t arrive, how long do I need to re-let these dates? That’s your window. Thirty days is conventional; it’s also useless if your property takes three months to fill.

The balance should then be collected in the same way the deposit was: a link the guest pays from, not an invoice they have to act on. Every additional step between “time to pay” and “paid” is a percentage of guests who don’t.

The edge case every system gets wrong

Here’s the one worth the whole article.

Your policy says the balance is due 30 days before arrival. A guest books three weeks out.

The balance due date is now in the past. What should happen?

The correct answer is that there is no balance — the schedule collapses into a single payment, and the guest pays in full at checkout. They booked inside your window, so the two-stage structure doesn’t apply to them.

The wrong answer, which is what a lot of systems actually do, is to create the schedule anyway and then push the past-due balance out by some arbitrary period — seven days is common. Think about what that produces: a guest who would happily have paid in full at checkout has instead been handed a payment plan nobody offered them, with a second payment falling due after they’ve already mentally finished the transaction. You’ve manufactured exactly the chase you were trying to avoid.

Airflow builds the schedule from your property’s own policy — deposit now, balance at check-in minus your balance-due days — and collapses it to one payment when arrival is already inside that window. If you’re evaluating any booking system, this is a good thing to test: make a booking inside your own balance window and see what the payment schedule looks like. It’s a two-minute check that tells you whether the logic was written by someone who thought about it.

What happens between the two payments

Three things worth being deliberate about.

The dates are held from the moment the deposit is paid. A deposit-paid booking is a confirmed booking, not a provisional one. If your system treats it as tentative, you have a double-booking risk wearing a friendly name.

Commission, if you pay any, should follow the money. Charging a platform fee on the full booking value at deposit time means paying commission on money you haven’t collected — and if the guest never pays the balance, you’ve paid for revenue that never existed. Airflow charges proportionally on each payment: commission on the deposit when the deposit lands, on the balance when the balance lands. We wrote up the reasoning in Commission on What You Collect.

The guest needs somewhere to see what they owe. Not an email they have to search for six months later — a page with the booking, the amount paid, the amount outstanding, the due date and a pay button. Most balance chasing exists because the guest has no way to check their own status.

What to do about the abandoned ones

A deposit flow creates a category that pay-in-full doesn’t: the guest who starts checkout and never finishes. They reached the payment page, the dates went on hold, and then their card failed or the phone rang.

Those dates must come back. Airflow holds a pending booking for 30 minutes, with a sweep every five, so worst case is about 35 minutes from abandonment to the dates being bookable again. Long enough to cover a slow card confirmation with margin; short enough that a busy property isn’t sitting on dead holds.

One design detail worth copying: the abandoned row is flipped to expired rather than deleted. You keep the record — how many people start and don’t finish is worth knowing, and when a guest emails saying “I think I booked?”, you can actually look.

The honest limit

Airflow will remind a guest about an unpaid balance automatically, every morning, with a cooldown so nobody gets nagged. What it will not do is cancel the booking when the balance never arrives. There’s no rule that releases the dates at T-0.

That’s deliberate. Cancelling someone’s holiday over a late payment is a judgement call about a person, and the failure mode of getting it wrong automatically is far worse than the inconvenience of deciding yourself. But it means the last step is yours — which is exactly why the outstanding list in What to Do When a Guest Hasn’t Paid the Balance is worth ten minutes a week.

The short version

Take 25–30% as a rule, more when your dates are hard to re-let.
Set the balance date from how long you need to re-let, not convention.
Test what your system does when someone books inside that window — it should ask for one payment, not invent a plan.
Hold the dates from the deposit, release abandoned checkouts within the hour.
Pay commission on money you’ve actually received.
Give the guest a page where they can see what they owe.

Get those right and the deposit stops being a payment step and becomes the thing that makes direct booking work at all.