How to Refund a Guest's Payment?

Charges made by guests when using Stripe or added by you as an offline payment are displayed in the "Paid" status on the reservation-specific detail page and the guest payments menu overview.

When you need to, you can refund the guest partially or fully the amount of a specific charge through your Hostaway dashboard.

Refund functionality is only available for Stripe. If you are using another payment processor, such as Braintree or Auth.net refund option will not be available in the Hostaway Dashboard. 

Creating a Refund

When opening the reservation-specific detail page, you have your overview of charges paid by the guest. You can refund full or partial amounts per charge. In the event multiple charges need to be refunded, you need to create per charge a refund.

To create a refund, please follow the next steps:

1. Go to your Hostaway Dashboard > Reservations

2. Select a Reservation > Scroll down > Payments > Invoices & charges

3. Select from the dropdown under the charge the option "Refund"

On the right side of your screen, the refund menu will open up, giving you several options:

1. Name. You can provide a short internal name for the specific refund
2. Refund amount. The amount you refund can be a part of the charge or the full amount as charged before
3. Reason. You should select one of the reasons why the refund is needed
   • Duplicate. When by accident you have charged the guest 2 times
   • Fraudulent. When the Guest or card owner claims his card was stolen, and the charge should be refunded
   • Requested by the customer. When the guest requested a refund for a charge
   • Other. For refund cases that do not fall under any of the above 3 reasons
4. Add more details about this refund. A short description field to provide more background details about why the refund was needed
5. Include in the price breakdown. Select this option when the refunded amount should also lower the total reservation sum so the guest would pay less for their reservation
6. Click at the bottom on the button "Refund Payment"

When refunded a new refund event will be added to the reservation detail payment timeline. When the charge refund was originally done by your connected Stripe account, the refund will be automatically initiated by Stripe to the guest involved. You will see on the Stripe side the payment depending on the amount listed as partially or fully refunded.

Refund receipts

After the refund is created, you can download a refund receipt. The refund will also show in the Guest Portal, where the guest can see and download the receipt. The template for refund receipts can be adjusted from the Hostaway Dashboard > Guest Payments > Document templates > Refund Receipt.

Notes

1. Starting 2023-10-09, the refund system will be activated in batches for existing HW clients. When you do not yet have access, please contact support to activate it for you
2. Additional menu and reporting items will be added during September / October 2023 updates will be posted in the user guide when released
3. Refunds by the Hostaway Dashboard are unavailable for Braintree-connected accounts
4. This refund feature only works for channels you manage the payment. This means that this does not work for Airbnb reservations since Airbnb manages the payment for them.

Disclaimer

• Total Paid is not directly affected or updated by refunds, whether they are included in the breakdown or not. This field only reflects the amount paid by the client, as shown in the total charges.
• For now, the expectation is that including or excluding refunds in the breakdown is mainly for guest visibility and will not affect the Total Paid field, although custom formulas can be used to match the intended information.