Prospects keep cancelling viewing appointments – what can you do?

You can't abolish cancellations. What you can change is their timing and their consequences: a prospect who cancels early costs you nothing, as long as the slot is immediately bookable again afterwards. Three levers are enough:

1. Make cancelling so easy that it happens early – two clicks from the confirmation that arrives right after booking, or from the reminder the day before. No phone call, no login.
2. Release the freed-up time automatically instead of hunting for it by hand.
3. For scarce appointments, confirm only after a request instead of confirming instantly.

The rest of this page explains how to set this up and what it does not solve.

Why a late cancellation costs more than a cancellation

Two cancellations the evening before, and your Saturday afternoon is gone. The time was reserved, the apartment prepared, the journey planned – and nobody can move up, because the other prospects never hear about the cancellation.

That is exactly where the damage happens, not at the cancellation itself. A prospect who cancels ten days ahead is a non-event. The same prospect cancelling two hours before, or not showing up at all, costs you a viewing appointment that someone else would have needed.

What you set up in timum

Make cancelling easy. Every confirmation and every reminder contains a link that lets prospects cancel in two clicks – without an account, without a callback. In every plan, the reminder goes out automatically 24 hours before the appointment (Appointment reminders). This is the lever that brings the no-show rate down from 20–30% to under 10%: not pressure, but a convenient way out, offered early enough.

Get the slot back. When someone cancels, the time is released again and is immediately visible to others through your booking link. If your appointments also come from Outlook, Google or your CRM, Real-time availability keeps the bookable times up to date in both directions.

Let prospects request first for scarce appointments. For each booking channel, you decide whether bookings are binding immediately or requested first (Three booking modes). For a property with forty prospects and two possible appointments, request mode is the calmer option: you see the requests before you confirm.

What this does not solve

Prospects who neither accept nor cancel will remain. So will prospects who sign up for five properties in parallel and only decide on the day of the appointment. You don't reduce either with reminders, but by knowing more about the prospect before you confirm – that is what request mode is for, and for sales, the pre-qualification of buyer prospects.

Checking whether it works

Under Settings → Statistics you can see bookings, attendance rate and cancellation rate for a period instead of guessing (Appointment statistics; one month of history is included in every plan, the full history in the PROFESSIONAL plans). It makes sense to compare the same four weeks before and after the changeover – and to separate *cancelled* from *no-show*: the former is a success, the latter remains a loss.

Next step

Set up a bookable calendar with automatic reminders and look at your cancellation rate after four weeks. Try it for free – 30 days, no credit card.