Typically a customer wish to perform, first, a search for hotel availability on the basis of certain criteria (city, date, type and number of rooms, etc ... - see “Searching for availability” in the documentation of the web service).

The result of this research is then shown to the customer.

It is important to note that, in this result, there often is also a parameter called “deadline”: this is the date by which you can cancel without being subject to a cancellation fee.
Should however be stressed that this parameter is not definitive but only indicative for the specific hotel and type of contract! If you don't find a deadline defined in the availability search response, you may use another method - namely "get_deadline" - in order to get an estimate of the cancellation deadline for the current solution. Please note that the estimate provided by get_deadline is not reliable and should not be considered as the final cancellation policy.

The customer then selects a hotel from the search carried out and will investigate further on the details of the hotel itself and - possibly – will perform a reservation.
It is very important, before making your reservation, to execute an "evaluate", which is a very specific search aimed at a specific hotel and agreement that will return all the valid details in terms of pricing and cancellation policies. This method will provide the exact date of the deadline and should be used to obtain the final, reliable cancellation policy.

This will not only get the exact date of the deadline but - if required for that particular contract - it will be possible to list the cancellation penalties provided by distance from check-in where you could, possibly, cancel the reservation.

Please, note: availability searches performed on rooms with cots or extrabeds may return the rooms as available, being the check performed only on the rooms and not on the “extras”.
Due to this behavior, you may notice that a room “immediately” available let the booking goes in “pending” status.
This issue is limited to booking with cots, extrabeds and, sometimes, due to textual remarks (which should be manually processed by reservation staff).