Cancelling frees the vehicle for those dates and closes the booking. It cannot be undone — there is no reinstate button, and a cancelled booking has to be rebooked from scratch.
Open the booking and choose Cancel booking. It is available while the booking is an enquiry, awaiting payment, awaiting approval, or confirmed. Once a hire is on, cancelling is not the right tool: run the return instead.
Before you decide anything
Read the estimate at the top of the modal. Glovebox has already worked it out from your cancellation policy, and it shows you four or five lines:
- Total paid toward this booking
- Cancellation fee your policy says applies
- Payment processing fees, when your settings make those non-refundable
- Estimated refund — the policy answer
- Refundable now via Stripe — what the gateway will actually allow today
Those last two are different numbers and the difference matters. The policy figure is what you owe the customer. The Stripe figure is what can be sent back through the original payment right now, which is lower if part of it has already been refunded.
When you cancel rather than the customer, no customer fee is applied — the modal says so when your policy is set to charge a fee of the total. You are not penalising someone for your own change of plan.
The three refund choices
Refund automatically via Stripe — the default. Sends back the policy amount against the original payment. Use it when the estimate looks right and you have not touched the payment in Stripe yourself.
Refund a specific amount — you type the figure. The field tells you the maximum refundable now. Use it when you have agreed something different with the customer, or when the automatic attempt was rejected.
Don't refund through Glovebox — cancels and refunds nothing here. Use it when you have already refunded in Stripe directly, or you are settling by bank transfer. This does not mean "no refund is owed" — it means Glovebox will not move the money, and you are taking that on.
Whichever you choose, add an internal reason. It is not shown to the customer and it is what you will want in three months when someone asks why.
What happens when you confirm
- The booking becomes Cancelled and the vehicle goes back to Available for those dates.
- Any live bond is dealt with regardless of the refund choice — an authorised hold is voided, a captured bond is refunded. A cancelled booking never leaves a hold standing against a customer.
- The cancellation is written to the booking timeline with your name, your reason, and both the amount intended and the amount actually refunded.
- If Notify customer by email is on (it is by default), the customer gets a cancellation email. It quotes the amount actually refunded, never the policy figure — so they are never told about money that did not move.
- You get an operator email regardless of that toggle, and if the pickup was close enough to count as urgent, your staff SMS goes out too. Cancelling a booking due tomorrow morning is not something you should have to notice in an inbox.
If the refund does not fully go through
Glovebox does not fail quietly. Where money was captured and the refund fell short, an alert is raised on your dashboard — "Cancellation refund could not be fully issued" — naming the booking, what was refunded, what was intended, and what is still owed. It does not clear itself; you resolve it once you have moved the money.
The operator email you receive is flagged the same way, and it is flagged slightly more often: it also warns you when money was captured and no gateway refund ran at all — the case where you chose Don't refund through Glovebox and it is now on you.
The cancellation still stands either way. The vehicle is still freed. What is left is money you need to move yourself, and the alert is there so it does not quietly become nobody's job.
If it did not work
- "The payment gateway rejected the refund." Usually the amount exceeds what is still refundable on that payment — often because part was refunded in Stripe already. The message names the gateway's reason. Choose Refund a specific amount with a figure inside the refundable maximum, or Don't refund through Glovebox and settle it directly. The booking is left untouched until you do.
- "Something went wrong while cancelling." The booking was not changed. Try again; if it persists, get in touch rather than cancelling repeatedly.
- Cancel booking is not on the booking. Either the hire is already on — use the return flow — or it is cancelled already.
- No payment options appear. Nothing was ever captured, so there is nothing to refund. The modal says so and cancels cleanly.
Things worth knowing
- The estimate is a preview, not a promise. It is calculated when you open the modal. If the money moved in Stripe in between, the gateway is the authority and the shortfall alert is how you find out.
- A refund can span more than one payment. If a deposit and a balance were both captured, Glovebox works through them oldest first rather than only refunding the deposit.
- Cancelling is not the same as marking a no-show. Your policy has a separate no-show fee; see Set your cancellation policy.