Loyalty Cash Credit: Overview

Let members spend their points as cash credit on direct bookings, in-stay folio charges, and at checkout. Every redemption goes through a single Quote → Hold → Confirm/Release lifecycle. The hold reserves points atomically while your integration completes the booking or bill.

No approval or fulfilment step

Cash credit is fully automated: nothing for the hotel team to approve or fulfil.

Your integration applies the confirmed credit to the booking or bill. Cash credit does not create a reward delivery task or a "Reward to fulfil" email.

If your checkout instead redeems a specific reward (a breakfast, an upgrade) through POST /api/v1/loyalty/redeem, send status: "fulfilled" when your integration has already delivered it. Omitting status uses the reward's configured auto_fulfill setting; otherwise the redemption is pending. Explicit "pending" overrides that setting when a person must still deliver the reward.

Three surfaces

Each surface is independently toggleable per tenant.

booking_direct: booking engine widget on the hotel's own site. Member sees an "Apply X points (€Y off)" chip and the cash credit is held while they complete the booking flow. No reservation required at hold time.

in_stay: guest portal or in-stay captive page. Member picks an amount and generates a one-shot credit code applied to folio charges. Reservation must already exist.

checkout: front-desk terminal or self-checkout kiosk. Operator (or guest) types in a member number and applies a short-lived hold against the bill total.

Channels: OTA/TTOO are blocked

The denylist runs before the allowlist.

Allowed channels are drawn from direct, website, phone, walk_in. Tenants opt in to whichever apply.

The following sources are always blocked, regardless of allowed_channels: booking.com, expedia, agoda, hotelbeds, hotusa, roiback, paraty, mirai, travelclick, siteminder, ota, tour_operator, ttoo.

Rationale: those bookings already carry commission and applying points credit on top is an additional cost for the hotel.

Hold lifecycle

A hold temporarily reserves points while the customer completes their flow.

       GET /credit/quote
            │  (read-only, no DB write)
            ▼
      POST /credit/hold ─────────► loyalty.credit.held
            │   (active, expires in hold_minutes)
            │
    ┌───────┼────────┐
    │       │        │
    ▼       ▼        ▼
  confirm  release  expire (cron)
    │       │        │
    ▼       ▼        ▼
  loyalty   loyalty   loyalty
  .credit   .credit   .credit
  .confirmed .released .released (cause=expired)
    │
    ▼
  loyalty.balance.changed
    │
    │   (cancellation path)
    ▼
  POST /credit/reverse ─────────► loyalty.credit.reversed
                                  loyalty.balance.changed

Holds default to 10 minutes (booking_direct) or 5 minutes (kiosk/front desk). The cronexpire_loyalty_credit_holdssweeps overdue actives on a schedule and emits oneloyalty.credit.releasedwebhook per expired hold (cause = expired).

Error codes

Returned in the standard envelope { error: { code, message } }.

Code	HTTP	Meaning
CASH_CREDIT_DISABLED	403	Tenant has cash credit turned off.
SURFACE_DISABLED	403	Surface (booking_direct / in_stay / checkout) is toggled off for this tenant.
CHANNEL_NOT_ELIGIBLE	403	OTA denylist hit, or channel missing from allowed_channels.
INSUFFICIENT_SPENDABLE	409	points requested exceeds loyalty_member_spendable().
BELOW_MINIMUM	422	points below cash_credit_config.min_points_per_redemption.
HOLD_EXPIRED	410	Confirm attempted after the hold's expires_at.
HOLD_NOT_FOUND	404	No hold for the provided hold_id / external_reference_id.
MEMBER_NOT_FOUND	404	No loyalty member matched the supplied identifier.
VALIDATION_ERROR	400	Zod schema rejected the payload. Offending field returned.