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Your policy answers two questions: how much does a guest get back when they cancel, and what can they change on their own without calling you. It lives at Settings → Policies — one page, one set of rules for the whole shop. An experience can override it with its own rules (below), and exactly one set of rules ever applies to a reservation: the experience’s custom rules if it has them, otherwise your shop policy.

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The refund schedule

The rules read as sentences, because that’s what they are:
100% refund until 2 days before the visit 50% refund until 4 hours before the visit With less notice than that — or once the visit has started — there’s no refund.
Choose Refund on a schedule to set the steps. Most wineries need just the first line: a full refund with enough notice. Click Add partial-refund step if you want a softer landing closer to the visit (up to three steps in all). Steps must move toward the visit and shrink — Riserva won’t save a schedule where a later step refunds more than an earlier one. Prefer All sales final for ticketed dinners or small-group events you can’t resell on short notice: no automatic refunds at any time. You can always refund manually from the Shopify order. As you edit, the “How guests will read it” preview shows the exact sentence Riserva generates from your settings:
Full refund until 2 days before your visit, then 50% until 4 hours before your visit; no refund after that. Guests can cancel online at any time, and reschedule while a refund is still available.
That same sentence appears on the reservation page, and its refund terms ride the guest’s confirmation email — what you set here is what guests are told, with nothing to keep in sync by hand. The schedule applies to staff cancellations too: cancelling from the reservation page computes the refund from these rules and shows it before anyone confirms.

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Guest self-service

Two switches:
  • Guests can cancel online — a Cancel this reservation link appears on your manage-reservation page, with the refund it would bring. Any refund follows the schedule above. By default guests can cancel at any time (they just stop getting money back); add an optional cutoff (“Closes 1 day before the visit”) to stop last-minute cancellations entirely — past it, the link disappears and the guest is asked to get in touch with you.
  • Guests can reschedule online — a Change date or time button appears while a refund is still available. That condition is automatic and anchored to the original time: without it, a guest past your refund deadline could move the reservation out a month, cancel from there, and collect a refund they’d already lost. Its optional cutoff closes rescheduling even earlier. One special case: an all sales final policy has no refund to protect, so there guests may reschedule right up to your cutoff — or the visit itself — making “non-refundable but movable” a policy you can express.
Both cutoffs show up in the generated policy sentence, so guests are told the limits before they hit them. Turn both off and the manage page tells the guest:
Online changes are closed for this reservation. Please contact the winery.
Your staff are never restricted by any of this. See Edit a reservation.

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Refund overrides

When a paid party shrinks — at check-in or on the reservation’s edit page — the refund for the removed guests follows the schedule above. Refund overrides decides who may go beyond it. The reservation’s edit page in the admin always offers a full refund. At the register it’s off by default: tick Allow POS check-in to refund beyond the policy to let front-of-house do the same. Every override lands on the reservation’s timeline with who did it.

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Entry fees at the register

For an experience charged At the visit — the card is saved at checkout and charged when the visit is closed out, unless the register settles it first — or a party whose fee is still due, the register’s Bill credits tile offers to add the entry fee to the sale or to waive it. Suggest waiving the fee when the rest of the sale is over sets the amount of the rest of the sale at which Waive becomes the suggested choice. Leave it blank for no suggestion — staff still choose on every sale. An experience can set its own amount on its Pricing card. A waived fee is recorded on the reservation and is never charged to the saved card.

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Cancellation reasons

Cancellation reasons is the short list guests choose from when they cancel online. Riserva starts you with “Change of plans”, “Travel or weather”, “Found another option”, “Booked by mistake” and “Other” — edit the wording, add your own (up to twelve), or empty the list to stop asking. Each answer is saved on the reservation.

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Custom rules for one experience

Open the experience and find Cancellation policy in its Booking rules card. It shows the rules that currently apply:
Follows your shop policy — Full refund until 2 days before your visit; no refund after that. …
Click Set custom rules for this experience to give it its own schedule and self-service switches — the same controls, applying to this experience only. Use the shop policy instead reverts it. Settings → Policies lists every experience with custom rules under Custom rules, so you can always see at a glance what deviates from the shop policy.

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What applies if you never touch this page

Riserva doesn’t leave you without a policy. Until you save one, the shop policy is:
  • 100% refund if cancelled 24 hours or more before the visit, nothing after
  • Guests can cancel and reschedule online
The Policies page shows exactly this until you change it — what you see on that page is always what a cancellation would actually compute. It’s worth a minute to make it match what you tell guests on the phone.

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What a refund actually covers

The percentage applies to everything the guest paid, including add-ons — “100% refund” has to mean 100% of what they paid, or the promise is a lie. The money goes back through Shopify to the original payment method. A phone reservation with no order attached has nothing to refund, so nothing moves. See Cancellations and refunds for what staff see and what lands on the timeline.
What things mean on this screen: What things mean: Settings