Terms and conditions

Your own terms, written by you, shown to anyone enquiring through your availability page and recorded against what they book. Nothing is shown until you publish some, and until then nobody is asked to accept anything.

Every version is kept, and that is the entire point. A booking made in January points at the terms that were current in January — publish new ones in March and that booking still points at what its customer actually read. A single editable box would answer “what are our terms” and not “what did this customer agree to”, which is the only question terms are ever asked.

So a version you have published freezes the moment somebody accepts it — after that, editing publishes a new version instead, and everyone who accepted the old one keeps it. Before anybody has accepted it you can still correct a typo in place, because otherwise an afternoon of tidying produces version twelve and the number stops meaning anything.

The confirmation email carries a copy of the terms as well as a link to them. The copy is what the customer received and can keep whatever happens to us; the link keeps working if you change your public link or take your availability page down, and always shows the version that customer agreed to rather than your latest. Both sit at the end of the email, after the dates and the number, because an email that opens with two pages of conditions is one nobody reads to the end of.

The copy is always the version that booking accepted, not your current one. A booking you took by hand accepted nothing, so it gets your current terms introduced as “our terms” rather than “the terms you accepted” — useful to send, dishonest to claim.

A booking you take by hand has accepted nothing, and says so on the booking rather than implying the current terms. An acceptance nobody gave is worse than none, because it is the one that would be produced in evidence.

Plain text, not a rich editor. Paste from wherever you keep them: line breaks are preserved and nothing else is reformatted, so the words stay yours.