Understanding the Policies API

Use the Policies API to create, modify, and retrieve policies for your properties. Currently, the API supports creating only cancellation policies. Cancellation policies define the cancellation penalty conditions that is enforced when a guest cancels a reservation.

Cancellation policies are specific to a property. You must create cancellation policy on the property level but assign them on the roomrate level.

While creating a cancellation policy you can define the following penalty conditions:

• The cancellation penalty fee using a cancellation penalty code
• The guarantee payment fee and
• The no show penalty fee

On successful creation of the cancellation policy, the API returns a policy ID which you can use to uniquely identify the cancellation policy and the penalty conditions. The policy ID does not change across the policy's lifespan. To learn more about cancellation policies and the penalty conditions, see Understanding Cancellation policies.

Booking.com provides cancellation penalty conditions with varying cancellation deadlines and penalties each identified using a cancellation code. You can find free and non-free cancellation codes. Based on your business needs, you can use an appropriate cancellation code while creating a cancellation policy. For a full list of cancellation codes, see the cancellation policy codes.

Policy count limit

Using the Policies API, you can create a maximum of seven cancellation policies for properties.

Default policy behaviour

Each property must have at least one cancellation policy. When creating a property using the OTA_HotelDescriptiveContentNotif endpoint, if you do not specify the cancellation policy details, the API creates a fully-flexible cancellation policy (PolicyCode=152) as the default cancellation policy for the property.

When creating a roomrate using the OTA_HotelProductNotif endpoint, if you do not specify a cancellation policy, the API assigns the property's default cancellation policy to the roomrate. To identify the default cancellation policy, check for the Default tag in the GET /policies response.

To summarise, a property always has at least 1 cancellation policy created for it and a roomrate always has a cancellation policy assigned to it.

Workaround to deleting an existing policy

The Policies API does not support deleting existing policies. However, you can repurpose an existing, unused policy to enforce new cancellation penalty conditions. To learn more, see Repurpose existing policy to enforce a different cancellation penalty.

Quick Actions

→ To create a policy, see Creating a policy.

→ To modify policy details, see Changing policy details.