Giving credit using gift cards

To issue a gift card directly when you cancel your customer’s booking:

1. Find and open the original booking.
2. Under Booking actions, select Cancel booking.

3. From here, you can issue a free gift card for the total amount paid (default) or enter a custom amount.

   You can also issue a partial refund alongside a gift card, or issue a full refund for the amount of the booking instead.

   

   Don’t see the option to issue a gift card? Make sure you have permission to issue gift cards and that your Dashboard has at least one gift card type. If you need help with permissions or gift card types, you can always contact FareHarbor Support.

4. Confirm that “Send cancellation email” is selected and that a valid email is entered. An email must be entered to ensure that your customer receives their gift card code.

   If your customer provided a valid email address when they booked originally, this field will already be filled in. If your customer would like to change their email address, or if they did not provide an address when making the booking, enter it here.

5. Select Cancel booking. Your customer will receive an email notifying them of the cancellation and along with any relevant gift card and refund information:

   

You can also issue a free gift card to a customer without cancelling their booking, as an incentive for them to return for a future trip or experience. Keep in mind that gift cards will be issued at no additional cost to the customer.

To issue a gift card without cancelling:

1. Find and open the original booking.

2. Under “Booking actions”, select Advanced, and select Issue gift card from the dropdown menu.

   

3. Input the amount you would like to credit, then select Issue gift card. You will be able to see the gift card code you created in the booking overview underneath the “Gift Cards” section.

4. From the booking overlay, select Send email to make sure your customer receives their new gift card code.

   If your customer provided a valid email address when they booked originally, this field will already be filled in. If your customer would like to change their email address, or if they did not provide an address when making the booking, enter it here.

   Gift card information will be included in confirmation emails, receipt emails, and rebooked emails (if applicable).

   

You can also give a customer a credit for a cancelled booking by rebooking the customer to your gift card item. This will automatically cancel the original booking and send the customer an email with their redeemable code.

1. Find and open the original booking.

2. Under Booking actions, select the Rebook button.

3. Select your gift card availability and click Rebook to here.

   Note: Depending on your setup, you might have one gift card availability per day, or you might have one per week or per month.

4. Choose the number of gift cards you’d like to issue (in most cases, just one).

5. Choose the gift card amount. If you choose Custom, the default will be the amount the customer paid on their original booking. However, you can change this to any amount you wish.

   

6. Select Rebook now.

7. From the gift card overview, select Send email or text and choose Rebooked as the email type.

8. Make sure the customer’s email address is entered, and select Send email.

Once rebooked, the original booking will be cancelled and the customer’s rebooked email will contain their gift card code:

The gift card amount will reflect the amount paid before the FareHarbor booking fee is applied, so even though the amount is smaller than the original payment, the gift card will bring your customer’s future subtotal to zero, which takes away the FareHarbor booking fee. Your customer’s future booking will be fully covered.

When a customer books online through your website, they can apply their gift card toward their purchase using the “Apply a gift card” option. To see what this looks like, see the Redeeming gift cards online section of the gift card overview page.

You can also redeem a gift card when creating a booking from your Dashboard. See Redeeming a gift card for steps on how to do this.

For more information on gift cards and how they can be redeemed, see our Gift Card FAQs.

FareHarbor’s reporting tools offer several ways to report on gift card information. Gift Cards reports allow you to track data like how many gift cards were created in a certain time range, or what outstanding liabilities you might have.

Additionally, when running Sales reports, you can group your data by payment type to see how much payment was collected in the form of gift cards.

Important notes

Gift card redemptions are not counted as revenue generated by your business.

• When a gift card is purchased by a customer, the generated revenue will be associated with the payment type the customer originally used to purchase the gift card (for example, “Credit Card”).
• When a gift card is issued by a Dashboard user from a booking and there is no additional payment taken by the customer, this does not count as generated revenue beyond the customers’ original payment on the booking.

It’s important to remember when running Sales reports that the redeemed amount for gift cards purchased or issued through FareHarbor do not reflect revenue generated by your business.

If you do not want gift card payments to be counted as revenue in your reports, we recommend using filters to remove the Gift Card payment type from your report.