What to do when fog closes the trail tonight

What does the cancel control actually do?

It is on the night, under "Move or cancel", beside the room cap. Before you press anything it states the two facts that decide whether this is a small night or a serious one: how many bookings the night holds, and how much money is sitting on them. That figure is the real one — what has been paid, less what has already gone back — not a list price multiplied by a headcount.

Pressing it marks the night cancelled, which is what takes it off the booking page and refuses any hold against it. A night that already has bookings will not go until you tick to say you know that, and either way the whole thing is written to the audit trail with your name on it: the date, the scope, how many bookings were affected, and what was settled.

You can call off this date only, or this date and every later one — the choice has no default, because a whole season taken off by a mis-click is the mistake that control exists to prevent.

What happens to the money, and who is allowed to decide?

Four options, none of them preselected. Refund everyone to the card they paid with; give everyone a credit to spend on another night; keep their booking for a date you will offer them; or nothing for now, because you are standing in a car park and have not decided yet. Whichever you pick is applied to every booking on the night in one action.

Giving money back is a different authority from calling off a night. A manager can close the night and can keep everyone's booking for a rearranged date; only an owner or your finance role can refund or credit. That is deliberate — a bulk cancellation is exactly where a permissions gap would cost the most.

• Tick "email every visitor who booked" and each person is written to once, after the money has actually moved, and told which of the three happened to theirs.
• Leave it unticked and nothing goes out, including when you chose to settle nothing — you can decide separately and come back to it.
• One mail per person, not per booking: a parent who booked twice for the same night hears from you once.
• This is the only bulk mail bindro sends. There is no general "message this night" control, so a change of parking or a late opening still goes out from your own tool, off the visitor CSV.

Why does the timing of the email matter so much?

Because the self-service refund window closes when the earliest surviving session on the booking starts. Before that moment a visitor can refund themselves in full from the link in their own email, with no involvement from you. After it, the link stops offering a refund and every one of those bookings becomes a manual job for your staff.

Four hundred entries across an evening is not an unusual night for a trail, and the difference between sending that email at four o'clock and sending it at seven is the difference between a handful of refunds and several hundred.

The one case where the window stays open indefinitely is an event with every night cancelled: there is no session left to start, so the link keeps offering a refund rather than trapping the money. For a single fogged-out Tuesday in the middle of a season, assume the deadline is real.

What about the money and the payout?

A refund returns money to the tender it came from, the visitor's own card first, and value paid with a gift card goes back onto the gift card rather than to a card — the provider can only give back what it took, and the gift leg is recorded on the order so it cannot be returned twice.

A cancelled night drops out of the payout schedule rather than delaying it. The payout for an event is scheduled once its last night that is still going ahead has ended, and released two days later — so calling off the closing Tuesday of a season can bring your payout forward, not push it back.

The case to know about is calling off EVERY night of an event: there is then no delivered date left to settle against, and no payout is scheduled for it at all. That is the right behaviour — the platform is not paying out money it is about to give back — but it means the settlement is the thing that closes the season, so refund or credit rather than leaving the night on "nothing for now".

Chargebacks from visitors who gave up waiting are handled, but they are a worse outcome than a refund for everybody. Speed is the whole strategy here.