If my customer wants to change the dates on a hotel booking after it is confirmed, can I do that in the system or do I have to cancel and book again?

Sometimes, but it honestly depends on the supplier the room came from. A good number of hotel suppliers do not accept a date change on a booking once it is confirmed, so the only route they give us is to cancel the original booking and make a fresh one for the new dates. Where a supplier does support amendments, we can pass the request through and your booking is updated, so there is no single answer that covers every hotel on your website.

When an amendment is possible, your staff raise the change from the booking in your back office and the system sends it to the supplier. The supplier either accepts it and returns an updated confirmation, or declines it. One thing to be ready for is that the new dates are usually priced at whatever the rate is today, not the rate your customer originally paid, so the amount can go up or down and you may need to collect or refund the difference.

Where a change is not allowed, the cancel and rebook route works, but the cancellation policy decides whether it is painless. If you are still inside the free cancellation window you can usually do it with no loss. If the deadline has passed, or the rate was a non refundable one, your customer may lose some or all of what they paid, and the room for the new dates might not be available at the same price.

Before you promise a customer anything, open the booking and read the cancellation policy and deadline shown against it, and tell us which suppliers matter most to you so we can confirm which of them accept amendments.