Glossary · Bookings
Late cancel
Updated
A late cancel is a cancellation that arrives inside the cut-off window, and the most common window in the trade is 24 hours before pickup. Inside that window the car has been held, the chauffeur has been scheduled and other work has been turned away, so the operator charges a fee, often 50 to 100 percent of the base rate.
The window is a commercial decision and it varies by work. Sedans in a dense market might run a 2-hour or 4-hour window. Motorcoach charters, where a 56-seat vehicle and a driver were blocked for a day, commonly run 48 to 72 hours or a tiered scale. Corporate accounts negotiate their own terms. Whatever the rule, it has to be written down before the booking, not argued after it.
The common mistake is not charging. A dispatcher taking a cancellation at 7:00 for an 8:00 pickup is busy, marks the trip cancelled, and nobody creates the fee. Over a year that is real money, and it trains customers that the cut-off is theoretical.
How liverybook handles it
The late-cancel window is set per tenant (default 24 hours) and can be overridden per rate. A cancellation inside the window moves the booking to late_cancelled, one of 7 booking statuses, and the fee rule on the rate (a percent of base or a flat amount) creates the invoice line automatically. Affiliate drivers cannot cancel a farmed-out trip; that stays with the dispatcher. See bookings.
Related terms
This term lives in Bookings. liverybook is the operating system for ground transportation.