Cancellation & Refund Policy

Booking a table places a $3.00 per guest hold on your card. A hold is not a payment — the money is reserved, not taken, and your bank may show it as pending.

45 minutes before your booking, free cancellation closes and the hold becomes a real charge. Turn up and settle your bill through Zikiti and it comes off that bill in full — it was never a fee. If you don’t turn up, or you paid the restaurant some other way, it stays with the restaurant. It never goes to Zikiti. Zikiti earns nothing when a table goes empty.

For bookings more than four days ahead, a hold would expire before you sat down, so we save your card instead and place the hold four days before your table. We email you when we do. If the card can’t be taken at the 45-minute point we’ll tell you and give you a chance to fix it; if it still can’t be taken, the booking is cancelled and the table goes back to the restaurant.

• Cancel or modify free of charge until 45 minutes before your reserved time — the exact deadline is shown on every booking. Cancel by then and the hold is released and never charged. There is nothing to refund because nothing was taken; banks can take a few days to stop showing the hold.
• You cannot cancel inside the final 45 minutes — that is the point at which the cover is charged and becomes the restaurant’s. They held the table for you.
• If you don’t turn up, the cover stays with the restaurant — it was charged at the 45-minute mark like every other booking, and there is no bill for it to come off.
• If the restaurant cancels your booking, you get your money back in full whatever the timing — released if it was still a hold, refunded if it had already been charged. You cannot lose a cover for a table you were never given the chance to take.

Every payment shows you the exact amounts — bill, saving, tip, fee — before you confirm, so surprises should be rare. If a charge is wrong (wrong amount, charged twice, a bill you didn’t authorize), contact support@zikiti.com within 30 days of the charge. We’ll investigate with the restaurant and, where a refund is due, issue it to your original payment method.

If a bill is refunded in full, the Zikiti platform fee on it is refunded too — the fee only exists because you saved money on a meal you actually paid for.

Tips are passed through to the staff member who served you, so they are generally non-refundable — except where the whole charge was made in error or duplicated, in which case the tip is refunded along with the rest.

Refunds are issued through Stripe to your original payment method. Once issued, banks typically take 5–10 business days to show the money back on your statement.

If your payment declines when settling your bill, the restaurant is entitled to charge you directly. Your cover has already been paid to them, so ask them to take it off what you owe — it is their money at that point, not ours. That’s between you and the restaurant, but tell us anyway so it doesn’t happen twice.