Hacker News Reader

Cancellation fees should not be more than double the actual fee of booking. This highly incentivizes no-shows and the use of virtual credit/debit cards for the initial booking.

View on HN

If you don't get the fee for just no showing I definitely agree. But I really do strongly believe that there needs to be heavy disincentives for reserving space that you don't use. The lack of extra space is the whole reason this site was needed in the first place.

Right but if you charge a fee to cancel then you've just made the no-show problem worse. Who would voluntarily pay fee when you can just do... nothing?

That's only true if the fee is greater than the paid cost, but the fee is only 40%. That means people still get back 60% of their money.

To put it another way, they could pay a $40 fee or lose $100 by doing nothing. Most people would rather pay the fee and get their $60 back.

If your goal is to maximize the number of people actually in the park, then you want cheap early cancellations, and high late cancellation and no-show fees. You want to encourage people to cancel with enough warning if they no longer plan to be there.

Not surprisingly, this is also the exact model that hotels use...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com