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Deposits and refunds

Deposits help cover the cost of a no-show on a larger booking. Set the rules once, and Make a Rezzy will ask the guest to pay at the point of booking. Refunds, when you want to give one, are something you can handle via Make a Rezzy.

How a deposit is taken

A deposit is triggered by party size. You set two things on your business settings:

  • Min guests before deposit is required — the threshold. A party of this size or larger will be asked for a deposit.
  • Deposit amount per guest — the per-head value, in pounds. The total taken is the per-guest amount multiplied by the number of guests.

Both fields go hand in hand — set them both, or leave both blank. If you leave them blank, Make a Rezzy will never ask a guest for a deposit on a regular booking.

Setting it up

  1. Sign in at manage.makearezzy.com.
  2. Open Business details from the left-hand menu, on the Basic tab.
  3. Click Edit.
  4. Set Min guests before deposit is required and Deposit amount per guest (£).
  5. While you are there, set Free cancellation window (hours before booking) if you want to give guests a window in which they can cancel without losing the deposit. Leave it blank if the deposit is non-refundable.
  6. Click Save.

Changes only affect new bookings. Existing bookings keep the rules that applied when they were made.

What the guest sees

The widget on your website is the entry point — the deposit itself is handled on Make a Rezzy, not in the widget. Here is what the guest walks through when their party crosses the deposit threshold:

  1. They pick a date, time, and party size in the widget and click through to book.
  2. They land on the Make a Rezzy booking form, where they fill in their name and contact details.
  3. Because the party is large enough to need a deposit, the booking form passes them on to a payment form showing the deposit amount.
  4. If they pay — the booking is created as Confirmed and they get the usual confirmation email.
  5. If they leave without paying — the booking sits as Pending Payment in your diary. It is a soft hold, not a confirmed slot. Your team can see it and chase if needed.

Smaller parties skip the payment form entirely and go straight to a confirmed booking.

Phone bookings and deposits

Deposits work a little differently when your team is taking the booking. There is no automatic prompt for the guest to pay — the deposit form is only shown to guests who book through the widget or Make a Rezzy. For phone bookings, the deposit is something you handle yourself, and you save the booking with a status that reflects what you have done:

  • Confirmed — use this once you have taken payment in a different way (card over the phone, in person on arrival, cash on the night), or when you have decided to trust the guest for this booking.
  • Pending — use this if you want to hold the slot provisionally while you sort out the deposit separately, for example because the guest needs to call back with a card.

See Taking a booking by phone for the full phone-booking flow.

Refunds

Refunds are handled automatically based on the free cancellation window you set on your business:

  • Cancellation inside the free window — Make a Rezzy refunds the deposit in full the moment the booking is cancelled. The guest is told they will see the money back on their card shortly.
  • Cancellation after the free window — the deposit stays with you. The guest was told this at booking, so there is no surprise on their end.
  • No free cancellation window set — every deposit is non-refundable on cancellation.
  • No-shows — the deposit always stays with you. That is what it is there for.

Your team does not need to do anything for any of these. The refund fires (or does not) as part of the cancellation itself.

Overriding the refund rule

Sometimes the rule is not the right call — a regular cancelling at the last minute, a goodwill gesture, a genuine emergency. When a deposit was kept (a late cancellation, or a no-show), you can refund some or all of it directly from the booking in Make a Rezzy, without leaving the app.

  1. Open the booking from the diary.
  2. Click Refund deposit.
  3. Pick the amount — full or partial — and confirm.

The refund goes back to the guest's card, and a note is added to the booking so your team can see what happened and why.

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