How Merac Handles Abandoned Baskets For Online Bookings

This Knowledge Base article will explain how the system deals with online abandoned baskets, to prevent booking/session allocation being held by these bookings, to be available for willing customers.

At the time the customer the customer has inserted all their booking details and click Pay Now, all their bookings details gets sent to your Merac database, saved as an online reservation, awaiting confirmation on a successful payment from your online payment provider. However, we have no control once we pass the customer to your online payment provider and may never receive a confirmation from your online payment provider if the customer does not proceed with payment.

Therefore, there has to be a set period of time before changing the customers booking to a cancelled reservation. Our system runs a process to cancel any online booking older than an hour (default) without payment confirmation, which can be adjusted. This is run every hour, which can mean bookings may not cancel until between 60-120 minutes after clicking Pay Now.

This is a reasonable amount of time to give customers time to pay for their booking (as they may need to find and attempt paying with multiple cards), without receiving payments after the booking has been cancelled, which must be avoided at all costs. This is because this will not resurrect the customers booking, and all seats the customer booked will be available again, potentially making a customer customer believe of having a booking, when they do not.

Some payment providers give customers 20 minutes to pay once customers are passed to their portal. So you may have some customisation at the online payment providers end to help with issues relating to this.