How the penalty and the refund are worked out
A penalty comes in one of three shapes, because that is how confirmations write them: a percentage, a number of nights, or a flat amount. A percentage is applied to the refundable base — what you paid minus any non-refundable booking or delivery fee — so a 10,000 booking fee on a 200,000 stay leaves 190,000 to work with, and a 50% tier charges 95,000 of that. Your total loss is 105,000: the 95,000 penalty plus the fee that was never coming back.
A “one night” penalty needs the nightly rate, which is why that field appears when you use a nights-based tier; a fixed penalty is taken as typed. Whichever shape it is, the penalty is capped at the refundable base — you can never be shown as losing more than you paid — and the tool flags it when a policy as written would have exceeded that ceiling.
The refund is back-calculated from the rounded penalty rather than rounded on its own, so penalty + refund always equals the refundable base on screen. Rounding each figure independently is how a table ends up one unit short of its own total.
Every money field is optional. Leave the amount blank and the deadlines, the countdown and the calendar file all still work — you simply see which tier applies instead of what it costs. A missing price never takes the rest of the tool down.
Which tier applies right now — the cheapest one still open
A policy is not a single ladder. “Free within 24 hours of booking” and “free until 10 days before check-in” hang off different anchors and coexist, and a consumer may use whichever is kinder. So the tier that applies is the cheapest one whose deadline has not passed — not the first row in the list, and not the row nearest in time.
Deadlines are inclusive: “cancel by 18:00” includes 18:00 itself, in both English and Korean practice. The countdown at the top points at the next deadline after which the penalty genuinely gets worse — passing a deadline that changes nothing is not worth a warning, and the tool skips it.
Rows are sorted by deadline, and two rows landing on the same instant are folded into one with the harsher penalty — showing two different numbers for a moment the visitor cannot tell apart would be worse than picking. If an earlier deadline costs more than a later one the tool still calculates but says so: that pattern is almost always a mistranscribed confirmation, not a real policy.
Four sentence shapes a real policy uses
- “Until 18:00, 3 days before check-in” — a calendar count. Enter 3 days and 18:00. Counting back on the calendar and then attaching the time is what keeps a daylight-saving change from moving the deadline by an hour.
- “Up to 20 minutes before the screening” — a true instant offset, so it means 20 minutes in every time zone. Cinema and performance policies are usually written this way.
- “Within 60 minutes of booking” — measured from when you booked, so the booking time is needed for that row and only that row. The Korean lodging standard’s 24-hour window carries a midnight clamp, which this tool applies automatically.
- “Free cancellation until 15 Oct 2026, 23:59” — a date printed on the confirmation. Enter it as an absolute deadline and no anchor arithmetic is involved at all.
When the confirmation names a day but no hour, 23:59 is the usual reading and the default here. Be careful with 00:00: it is the instant the day begins, so choosing it removes a whole day from your window.
The Korean settlement standard tiers, as the presets load them
- Lodging, peak season, weekday — free within 24 hours of booking and until 10 days before; 10% from 7 days; 30% from 5 days; 50% from 3 days; 80% from then on, including the stay date itself and a no-show.
- Lodging, peak season, weekend (a Friday or Saturday stay) — the same ladder at 20 / 40 / 60 / 90%.
- Lodging, off-peak weekday — free until 2 days before, 10% from 1 day before, 20% on the day and for a no-show. Off-peak weekend: 20% from 1 day before, 30% on the day.
- Performances — full refund until 10 days before, 10% from 7 days, 20% from 3 days, 30% from 1 day, and 90% from curtain-up. Cinema: free until 20 minutes before the screening, 50% after that.
- Booking platforms — the Korean apps run much shorter windows of their own, around 10 minutes for hotels and an hour for motels. International hotels commonly use “free until 14 days before, then one night”, and airline tickets are usually free within 24 hours of booking with a fare-specific fee afterwards.
These are seed values that fill the form in one click. The presets are not contractual — the operator’s own terms take precedence — so replace them with what your confirmation actually says before trusting a number.
Reading the timeline: cancel now or wait?
The bar shows the whole life of the booking as coloured segments — free, moderate, severe — with a marker at where you are now. Segment widths follow real durations, except that every segment keeps a floor of 12% of the bar: a 10-minute free window is something you have to be able to see and tap, not a hairline.
The number to watch is the difference: what cancelling now costs against what it will cost after the next deadline. If that gap is small, waiting for a change of plan is rational; if it is most of what you paid, the decision is really about whether you are going at all. Waiting past a deadline for no reason is the most expensive kind of indecision, and it is exactly what a countdown is for.
A no-show is usually the worst outcome available: most of the tiers above charge the same for a no-show as for a same-day cancellation, and some charge more. If you have decided not to go, cancelling costs nothing extra and occasionally costs less.
When the calculation does not settle the question
Non-refundable rates are a real product, not a mistake. Enter 100% as the penalty from the start and the tool will tell you honestly that there is no free window — which is worth knowing before you spend an hour arguing. What you may still be able to recover comes from elsewhere: travel insurance, a credit card’s trip-cancellation cover, or the platform’s own goodwill policy for illness and bereavement.
The tool also cannot tell you which rules bind. Where the booking was made through a platform, three sets of terms are in play at once — the platform’s, the property’s and, in Korea, the settlement standard used when nothing else was agreed — and they do not always agree. Keep the confirmation email: the version you were shown at the time of booking is the one that matters in a dispute.
Finally, refunds in a foreign currency come back at the rate on the refund date, not the booking date, and the card’s foreign transaction fee is usually not returned. A “full refund” on a foreign booking can therefore still land a few per cent short of what left your account.