False bookings, and what separates them from a missed hour
A false booking is one placed under a name or number that is not the client’s, or sent as a joke; a missed appointment on its own is not one.
An airport booking involves a journey agreed in advance and an hour held against everything else. A booking that was never meant to happen costs that time for nothing, and the house treats it differently from an ordinary cancellation.
The four criteria
A booking is false if any one of these is true:
- it was placed under a name that does not belong to the client;
- it came from a phone number or a profile belonging to someone else;
- it was sent as a joke;
- a no-show followed one of the three above.
What is not a false booking
A traveller who booked honestly and then missed the hour because the inbound landed late, or border control held them, or they fell asleep in the room, has not made a false booking. That is a cancellation, read on the ordinary notice scale described in the cancellation entry.
The note
Where a booking does fit a criterion, or a visit ends because a limit was pressed, the house writes a short internal note: the date, what happened, and the name and number used. It is kept for twelve months, is seen by nobody outside the house, and decides one thing, whether a further booking from that name is taken. How to object to it or ask for it to be corrected is explained on the privacy page. If what happened looks like a crime, the police may be told.