I think owners need to consider cancellation deadlines when listing on KOALA. If you can cancel your owner reservation up to 60 days in advance with no penalty, then consider offering the Firm: Cancel for a full refund up to 62 days before check-in refund policy. For those Worldmark, consider 32 day policy they have. I know some have proposed additional cancellation policies like full refund minus processing fee if cancelled at x.
I see so many listings as Strict: Booking is nonrefundable. I get it that no one wants to do work twice, but one should be able to charge more for a more flexible cancellation policy and cancellations should be a small percentage of overall bookings. Having a more flexible cancellation policy also makes you more competitive against those that don't offer it. One of course needs to consider the expiration date of their points or ownership when setting a cancellation policy.
The problem I have is with the 62 days. For my Hyatt ownership, my points are very restricted if I cancel 60 days or less in advance of the reservation. The Hyatt website is frequently down, and you need to call in to cancel. There are days when I’m so busy at work, that I don’t have time to sitting on hold for an hour. Now it’s not inevitable that I’ll sit on hold for an hour, but I have to be prepared to. Additionally, the Hyatt phone lines are open M-F, you can’t call on the weekend. So say my renter cancels at day 62- I will be desperately scrambling to try to cancel my Hyatt reservation within the ensuing 24hr, and I could be SOL. A 65 day cancellation policy would work. A 62 day cancellation policy might work if the Hyatt website was more reliable, and if I were a retired person or a full-time renter of timeshares.
Then say this is a holiday week that gets cancelled at 62 days out. My options are: cancel the Hyatt resevration and lose the valuableness of the holiday reservation but get my points back OR hold onto the reservation and hope it rents but if it does not and I need to cancel, then be stuck with restricted use points.
This is not to mention that the Hyatt system, I have to pay a reservation fee, then a cancellation fee, then an additional reservation fee to make another reservation, then another cancellation fee if the next renter cancels. This is around $120. Sure, the answer might be to “just charge more” but if you factor in the possibility of a couple of cancellations due to a flexible cancellation policy you need to price your week accordingly, starting with $120 above what you actually want for the week, and then increasing that price by $120 after each cancellation. So you have an increasingly perishable product (a timeshare week) that you’re *raising* the price on, hoping to move it.
I think the reality is that a generous cancellation policy dose not make tons of sense with some systems like Hyatt. I could probably work with a 90 day cancellation policy but 62 days just isn’t viable for my Hyatt rentals.