Release and cut-off

Release is the part of the contract that protects you: nights the agency has not sold come back to open inventory automatically, without anyone having to remember.

Two ways to set it

Rolling — each night releases a fixed number of days before itself. 14 days before each night means the night of 20 August frees up on the morning of 6 August, while the night of 21 August is still held for another day. This is the usual arrangement, and it lets the far end of a long contract keep running while the near end comes back to you.

Fixed date — every held night releases on the same day. Simpler to explain to an agency, blunter in practice: on the cut-off you get the whole remainder back at once.

Rolling release is easiest to see in the night ledger, where every night carries its own release date fourteen days ahead of itself:

Rolling release, night by night

When exactly a night frees up

A room-night becomes sellable to anyone again at 00:00 server time on its release date — that date itself is already open, not the day after.

Warning: The cut-off is computed at the server day boundary, which can differ from resort-local time by up to a day. If your agency contract is written against local cut-offs, add a buffer day when setting the release.

Rolling release is also retroactive: nights already in the past count as released. A contract activated late does not hold nights it could never have sold.

The reminder

Set a reminder and the agency contacts get an email that many days before the release, warning them what they are about to lose. Set the contacts on the contract (or on its Email list tab) or nobody is warned.

Two more mails come from the same daily pass:

• Allotment released — a digest of the nights that just went back to open inventory.
• Holdings reduced — sent when a contract lost held nights for another reason during the day, with the night ledger to explain which.

All three run once a day, in the small hours, and a failure in one contract never stops the others.

Releasing by hand

You do not have to wait for the cut-off. On the contract, Release returns all unsold nights immediately; you can also release specific rooms rather than the whole contract.

A manual release asks for a reason and who requested it, and both are required — the release is written into the contract's history, so months later it is still clear that the agency asked for it rather than someone clicking the wrong button.

Release, cancel, expire

• Release returns the unsold nights. Bookings already made stay, and stay linked to the contract.
• Cancel ends the contract early and removes all holds.
• Expired happens on its own once the hold period is over.

None of the three touches a booking that has already been sold from the contract.

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Who can access this: releasing and cancelling require Allotments (update). These actions stay available even when the Agency Sales module has been switched off, so a downgraded system can still free its rooms.