How can I charge my attendees a fee or penalty?

How can I charge my attendees a fee or penalty?

After your payment gateway has been added to your system by the Meetingmax team, a new section for your events' Payments tab will appear, called Reservation Penalties. Here, you can configure fees for late bookings, late date changes, and late cancellations. Let's set one up together!

Adding a new fee

To add a new fee, select the fee type from the Type drop down, and give the fee a label. For this example, we'll set up a new late booking fee, and we'll be extra creative by naming it "Late Booking Fee". Then, we'll click Add Fee to continue. 



Our new fee will be added to the table below, and we are now ready to edit its settings and configure it how we like. 



In the pop-up dialogue, we need to enter the date in which the fee will go into effect. We'll also configure how much the fee will amount to and which sub-blocks (including an option for the main block) will be affected by the fee. In this case, we'll say it's just for the main block, and we'll charge attendees $20, starting on October 1st.


Once we save, the fee will be completed and will be ready to go once October 1st, 2019 comes around. If we enter a date that has already passed, the fee will go into effect immediately. 

So how does it look, exactly?

Late Booking Fee on front-end and back-end


If you have set up a Late Booking Fee that is now in effect, it will appear on your event's front-end page as a component of an attendee's reservation total. Continuing with our above example, we can see that the attendee will be charged a late booking fee of $20 when completing their reservation, in addition to the one night's room and tax deposit that has also been set up. 



The fee will also apply when creating reservations in the back-end. However, as an MCP user, you are provided with an option to waive it. When saving the reservation with the Waive option toggled on, the fee will not be charged. When enabled, any applicable deposits will also not be charged, but will still apply toward the reservation's Amount Remaining field as per normal.

Late Cancellation Fees on front-end and back-end

Like with the late booking fee, setting up a late cancellation fee will ensure that attendees are always charged a set value, as configured. If the cancellation is being submitted by an MCP user in the back-end, the system will provide a field to enter how much the fee will amount to. This gives you the opportunity to decide to enter $0 instead, and thus waive the fee for the attendee. This field is available at all times, regardless of reservation status or cancellation method.



In the change request portal, when cancelling their stay, your attendees will see the yellow message shown above, including the amount that will be charged on their card. Note that this text is completely customizable when setting up the late cancellation fee!