Reservation, cancellation and no-show terms for restaurants, hotels and salons — Swiss restaurants increasingly charge no-show fees; a fee is legally enforceable as a contractual penalty only where the guest gave clear, informed consent BEFORE the booking was confirmed (e.g. an explicit checkbox or card guarantee at the time of booking).
⚠️ This is a blank template, not legal advice: check the wording with a lawyer and adapt it to your jurisdiction and your case.
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RESERVATION & NO-SHOW POLICY (RESERVIERUNGS- UND NO-SHOW-BEDINGUNGEN)
Business name (Business type) Effective date: Effective date
1. FREE CANCELLATION 1.1. Reservations may be cancelled or changed free of charge up to Free cancellation window (hours before) hours before the reserved time.
2. NO-SHOW / LATE-CANCELLATION FEE 2.1. Fee: No-show / late-cancellation fee, calculated as: Fee basis. 2.2. This fee is charged where the guest neither attends nor cancels within the free-cancellation window above ("no-show"), or cancels after that window.
3. LEGAL BASIS — CONTRACTUAL PENALTY, NOT AUTOMATIC 3.1. ⚠️ Swiss law does not automatically entitle a business to charge a no-show fee — it is only enforceable as a contractual penalty (Konventionalstrafe) where the guest gave clear, informed consent to it BEFORE the reservation was confirmed. A fee added only afterwards, or buried where the guest could not reasonably notice it, is not enforceable. 3.2. Guarantee method used to secure consent: Guarantee method 3.3. How consent is captured and evidenced: How consent to the fee is captured
4. LATE ARRIVAL 4.1. A table/slot is held for Grace period for late arrival (minutes) minutes past the reserved time; after that, it may be released and treated as a no-show under section 2 above, unless the guest has notified the business of a delay.
5. HOTELS AND GUESTHOUSES 5.1. Hotel-specific cancellation note 5.2. For accommodation bookings, cancellation terms may also draw on the customary terms published by hotelleriesuisse (formerly HotellerieSuisse) as an industry benchmark, in addition to the terms above.
6. HOW TO CANCEL 6.1. Guests may cancel via the same channel used to book, or any channel stated at the time of confirmation.
— — — ⚠️ This is a boilerplate template, not legal advice. Swiss employment, consumer-protection, data-protection, and food-safety law (Code of Obligations "OR"/"CO", L-GAV/CCNT für das Gastgewerbe, Arbeitsgesetz "ArG"/ArGV 1, Datenschutzgesetz "DSG" 2023, LMG/LGV) includes significant cantonal variation (minimum wages, Meldeschein/guest-registration forms, Kurtaxe rates, Spesenreglement approval, hygiene guidance, alcohol age limits) and the L-GAV minimum-wage figures are re-indexed every year — have this document reviewed and adapted by a Swiss employment/legal advisor and verified against your canton before use. Where a German-, French- or Italian-language version of this document is also used, that version prevails in case of conflict.
Fields that belong to a switched-off clause are dimmed — they are not asked for.
e.g. checkbox, SMS/email confirmation with terms attached, verbal confirmation logged
Only relevant for hotels/guesthouses — reference to customary cancellation terms or hotelleriesuisse AGB
1 of 10 fields are taken from the company, employee or counterparty record, the questionnaire can be dictated to the AI, and the finished document comes with a number, a PDF and an acknowledgement record.