Cloudbeds Payments Refunds FAQ

• Credit card refunds take an average of 3 to 7 business days from the issue date to reach the cardholder's account. This timeframe does not include weekends or federal bank holidays.
• Some issuing banks can take up to 30 days to provide a refund.
• Once you submit the refund to the card, there is nothing you can do to speed up this process. After you process a refund, it is up to the card-issuing bank to post the credit to the cardholder's account.
• If a refund was processed successfully but has not reached the cardholder within the expected timeframe, ask the cardholder to call the number on the back of the card and confirm the expected refund date with the card issuer.

Customize your refund policy to ensure your guests are aware of your terms and conditions. It is important that your guests understand how your property handles refund requests to prevent unwarranted chargebacks. Review the following article to update your policies:

Policies Overview

We suggest considering a flexible or case-by-case refund policy as all major credit card companies allow cardholders to dispute a transaction if a guest can demonstrate any issue with the purchased product or service.

Learn more about chargebacks in this article:
Cloudbeds Payments: How to handle a retrieval or chargeback

Assuming that the card used is still valid, you can refund a transaction up to 12 months from sale date. It is recommended to include your property's standard timeline for issuing refunds in your terms and conditions.

Yes, please check the following article to learn more about refunds:

Cloudbeds Payments: How to process refunds

When refunding a transaction, you have an option to enter the desired amount of the refund or you can keep the total amount (by default).

A refund cannot be undone. Be sure when processing a refund that the desired amount entered is correct as all refunds submitted to a credit card are final.

In this case, a few things can happen:

• If a new card was activated with the same card issuer, the refund is normally credited to the new payment card by the issuing bank.
• If the account was closed recently (last 2 months), the refund may be posted, and the card issuer usually contacts the cardholder to notify them of any next steps.
• If the account has been closed for some time, the attempt to credit the card will fail and you will receive an internal error. In this instance we advise you to issue a check to your cardholder and document the check being issued in the event of any dispute. You are unable to refund a transaction to a different credit card other than the card used for the initial transaction.

Any refunds processed will be taken from your next Payout balance. If your balance does not cover the refund amount processed, you will see a debit from your bank account for the net difference.

For example, if you have daily payouts enabled and you process a sale for $55.00 and process a $100.00 refund on the same day, you will see a debit from your bank account of $45.00 (plus any fees associated).

Note if you are enabled for weekly or monthly payouts, the above may not be applicable.

To change to a weekly or monthly payout frequency, please email cbpayments@cloudbeds.com.

Payment Card Industry standards require merchants to issue refunds in the same manner as the original form of payment. As a merchant, this helps prevent a chargeback because the card issuer will be able to see the original sale and the refund to the same card.

To ensure your customer is given back the money processed in error, simply perform a Refund Transaction on the sale. You cannot void or delete a transaction once processed.

In this case, you need to request a refund for the deleted reservation from the Cloudbeds Payments team by sending an email to cbpayments@cloudbeds.com and providing the following information:

• Requester name
• Reservation ID
• Guest name
• Amount to be refunded
• Reason for refund

For cancellation requests, do not delete the reservation from Cloudbeds PMS. Instead, change the reservation status to canceled. For more information, see Cancel direct reservations

Transactions made via the Cloudbeds Payments terminal can be refunded via the Cloudbeds PMS. Refunds will be processed directly through the PMS. Learn more: Cloudbeds Payments: How to process refunds

Transactions not related to a reservation can be processed in the House Accounts. The details of the refund are recorded in the respective House Account and in the reports: Payment Processing Report, Transactions Report.

Yes, contactless/tapped transactions work exactly the same as EMV. Card/token will be tied to the transaction in the folio and a refund can be processed as normal. Learn more: Cloudbeds Payments: How to process refunds

For security reasons, Cloudbeds PMS does not store credit card details when a payment is processed through Apple Pay or Google Pay. To refund one of these transactions, open the folio and issue the refund from the transaction's gear icon.

The following example shows where to find the refund action in the folio.