Glossary
No-show
A booking the renter never picks up — the vehicle goes back to availability after a grace window, and a no-show charge is applied per the rental terms.
A no-show is a confirmed booking where the renter never arrives at the pickup location. Operators typically wait a defined grace window — commonly 1 to 24 hours after the scheduled pickup, depending on the channel and rate — before marking the booking as a no-show and releasing the vehicle back to inventory. The grace window is shorter on prepaid bookings (the money is already taken) and longer on corporate or premium tiers.
What gets charged depends on the rate: a non-refundable prepaid rate is forfeited in full, a pay-on-arrival rate often loses just the deposit, and some operators charge a flat no-show fee. OTAs (booking.com, Discover Cars, etc.) handle their own no-show logic on top of the operator's rules, so what the customer actually loses can differ from what the operator collects.
In renviq, the no-show policy lives on the rate plan as a duration window and a charge rule, and the booking lifecycle has an explicit `no_show` state. When the booking transitions to that state, the vehicle is released, the configured charge is recorded, and the audit log shows exactly when the call was made and by whom.