Cancellation terms that survive consumer court

A client cancels four days before departure, calls it "force majeure," and demands a full refund. Your booking form says booking amount non-refundable, no refunds within 15 days of departure. You feel covered. You are not.

Consumer commissions across India have built a steady stream of orders that look straight past clauses exactly like this one, calling them an unfair trade practice, and order the refund anyway. That's not because the law hates tour operators. It's because most agency terms and conditions were copy-pasted from someone else's website years ago and were never built to survive an actual hearing.

Filing that hearing has also gotten easier for your client. Complaints now go in online through e-Jagriti, which replaced e-Daakhil in January 2025 and lets a consumer file, track and even attend hearings without a lawyer or a trip to the district court. Assume the client sitting across from you on WhatsApp has already read a guide on how to escalate. This post is the cancellation policy that survives that conversation: slabs tied to real vendor forfeiture, a working visa-rejection clause, force majeure that separates refund from credit note, itinerary-change rights, tax pass-through language, and the paper trail that decides the case before anyone files it.

Why nearly every dispute lands in your lap, fast

As of July 2026, under the pecuniary jurisdiction rules that took effect in December 2021, the District Commission handles any case where the consideration paid is up to Rs 50 lakh; the State Commission takes Rs 50 lakh to Rs 2 crore, and the National Commission anything above that. A honeymoon package, a family Europe trip, even a mid-size group tour: almost none of it crosses Rs 50 lakh. That means virtually every cancellation dispute you'll ever face goes straight to the local District Commission, which is fast, cheap to file in, and does not require the client to hire a lawyer.

Combine that with e-Jagriti's online filing and you have a genuine shift in leverage. Ten years ago, a client annoyed about a forfeited advance had to physically visit a consumer forum, draft a complaint, and wait months for a hearing date. Today they file from their phone. The friction that used to protect a badly-written cancellation clause is gone. (Confirm the current jurisdiction limits with your lawyer before you rely on the figures above. They're set by rules that can be revised.)

Build slabs around what your vendors actually forfeit

The single biggest mistake in most agency T&Cs is a flat rule, something like "no refund within 15 days," with no connection to what the agency itself loses when a client cancels. Commissions ask a simple question: what did you actually forfeit to your hotel, transporter or airline? If your clause forfeits more than that, you're profiting from the cancellation, and that reads as unfair.

The fix is a graded slab, published on the booking form itself, with the logic visible:

Days before departure	Typical vendor forfeiture	Refund to client
30+ days	Token or none	Full amount minus token booking fee
15–29 days	Partial hotel/vendor advance lost	Amount minus documented vendor forfeiture
7–14 days	Most vendor payments locked	25–50% of package cost
0–6 days / no-show	Vendor payments fully locked	Nil, but only with proof of full forfeiture

This is agency practice, not a legal formula. Align the exact percentages to what your actual contracts with hotels and transporters say, and keep those vendor contracts on file. The moment you can show "we forfeited this to the hotel, so we forfeited this to the client," the slab stops looking arbitrary.

Example: A client books a ₹1,20,000 Kerala package and cancels 10 days out. Your houseboat operator's contract says 50% forfeiture inside 14 days; your hotel's says 40% inside 10 days. Blended vendor loss on the trip works out to roughly ₹42,000. Your slab should return the client something close to ₹78,000, not zero, and you should be able to show the vendor invoices that justify the ₹42,000 you kept.

Careful: A clause that keeps 100% of the booking amount regardless of notice period, with no vendor evidence behind it, is the single easiest clause for a commission to strike down. If you can't produce a vendor cancellation invoice, don't claim the forfeiture.

The visa-rejection clause almost nobody writes

Visa rejections are one of the most common cancellation triggers on outbound packages, and most agency T&Cs simply fold them into the standard cancellation slab, which is a mistake, because clients now arrive pre-briefed on this exact point. Consumer-facing guides coach travellers to demand a refund of everything except the visa fee itself when a visa is rejected, then escalate through a legal notice, the National Consumer Helpline, and finally e-filing if the agency stalls.

Write the visa clause separately, and make it generous on the one line item you can't control anyway (the consulate's own non-refundable fee) while protecting yourself on everything you already paid out:

• Visa fee and any consulate service charge: never refundable (you already remitted it).
• Your service fee for visa processing: refundable only if the application wasn't yet lodged.
• Hotel, transport and other package components: refunded per the standard slab, since the vendor forfeiture is identical whether the client cancelled or the consulate did.

A client who gets a fair, itemised breakdown on visa rejection rarely escalates. A client who's told "no refunds" and then researches their rights online almost always does.

Force majeure: refund and credit note are not the same thing

"Force majeure" gets used loosely by both sides. Clients invoke it to demand a full refund, agencies invoke it to offer nothing. Neither is automatically right, and your T&Cs should say so explicitly rather than leaving it to be argued out in a hearing.

The distinction that holds up: force majeure that stops the trip before it starts (a flight ban, a border closure, a disaster at the destination) entitles the client to whatever you can recover from vendors, refunded in cash, not locked into a credit note nobody asked for. A credit note is acceptable only as an option you offer, never as the only thing on the table.

Write two separate rights into the clause: a cash refund of the recoverable portion, and a separate, optional credit note with a validity long enough to actually use.

Give yourself the right to change the itinerary, in writing

Weather, local strikes, and vendor overbooking will force itinerary changes on some share of your departures every season. If your T&Cs are silent on this, a swapped hotel or a dropped excursion becomes "deficiency in service" rather than a routine operational call.

State plainly that you reserve the right to substitute a comparable hotel, transport option or sightseeing slot when circumstances outside your control require it, with the client informed as soon as practical. Pair this with a downgrade clause: if the substitute is genuinely lower-value, the difference gets refunded, not absorbed silently.

GST and TCS: what's actually refundable

Clients frequently assume a cancellation refund should include every rupee they paid, taxes included. It shouldn't, and your T&Cs should say why rather than leaving the client to assume you're pocketing it. GST charged on your service is remitted to the government on your invoicing cycle; TCS collected on outbound packages is credited to the client's own PAN and claimed back through their income tax return, not through you. Neither is money sitting in your account waiting to be returned.

Spell this out as a line item on the invoice, which is easier if your invoicing setup breaks out GST and TCS separately rather than as one lump tax figure, with wording like: "GST and TCS collected are statutory remittances, adjusted not refunded, on cancellation." Then point clients to how TCS actually gets reconciled. Rates and mechanics change; confirm current figures with your CA. For the pass-through itself, see how TCS on overseas tour packages works in practice; for invoicing correctly in the first place, see how to invoice a tour package at 5% or 18%.

Evidence discipline: get the cancellation, and your response, in writing

Consumer commissions decide most cancellation disputes on documents, not testimony. The single biggest predictor of who wins is who has the paper trail, and most of that trail today lives in a WhatsApp thread, not a signed form.

Three habits fix this:

1. Require cancellation requests in writing: a WhatsApp message or email is enough, a phone call is not. Reply to confirm receipt with the date and time, which starts your slab clock on a date you can prove.
2. Send your refund calculation in writing too, itemised against the slab and referencing the vendor forfeiture, before you process anything. This is the document a commission reads first.
3. Keep vendor cancellation invoices and hotel/transporter contracts on file for every package, not just the ones that go wrong. You cannot produce evidence of forfeiture after the fact if you never asked the vendor for it.

A booking form that says "cancellations must be requested in writing via WhatsApp/email to [number/address]" is a two-line addition that does more for your case than almost anything else in this post.

Three patterns that lose the case before you even argue it

Some clauses and habits are close to unwinnable regardless of how carefully you draft the rest of your T&Cs.

Blanket forfeiture with no vendor basis. "Booking amount is non-refundable" with nothing behind it invites the commission to ask, simply, what you actually lost. If you can't answer, you lose the forfeiture.

Refunding some clients but not others. This is the fastest route to a finding of unfair trade practice. An Ernakulam District Commission recently held a travel company liable for refusing a refund it had already granted to similarly placed customers, calling it discriminatory treatment and an unfair trade practice under Section 2(47) of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. The order: a refund of Rs 1,65,510, Rs 10,000 in compensation, and Rs 5,000 in costs. The lesson isn't about the amount: it's that your slab has to apply the same way to every client in the same situation, and you should be able to show that it did.

Sitting on a refund for months. A commission that sees a client waited weeks past your own T&C-stated timeline for money you'd already agreed to return reads that delay as bad faith, independent of whether the original cancellation clause was fair. State a concrete processing window in your T&Cs (say, 10 working days from written confirmation) and hit it. A policy that's fair on paper but slow in practice still loses.

For a broader look at how these disputes actually get decided once they're filed, see how consumer courts decide cases against travel agencies; and if your cancellation slab isn't yet tied to what your suppliers refund you, start with a cancellation policy that matches what your suppliers refund.

Common questions

Is a "no refund" clause illegal in India?

Not automatically. What gets struck down is a no-refund clause with no basis in actual cost or loss, or one applied inconsistently between clients. A graded slab backed by vendor forfeiture evidence is far more defensible than a blanket "no refunds" line.

Can a client really get a full refund if a visa is rejected?

Consumer-facing guidance coaches clients to expect a refund of everything except the consulate's own visa fee. Writing that split explicitly into your T&Cs, rather than lumping visa rejection into the standard cancellation slab, removes the most common friction point.

How long do I have to process a refund before it becomes a problem?

There's no single statutory deadline that applies to every agency, so state your own concrete window in your T&Cs (commonly 7–10 working days from written confirmation) and treat missing it as seriously as getting the underlying clause wrong. Delay reads as bad faith even when the original decision was fair.

The short version

• Tie cancellation slabs to documented vendor forfeiture, not a flat "no refunds within X days" rule: commissions ask what you actually lost.
• Write a separate visa-rejection clause that refunds everything except the consulate's own fee; clients now arrive expecting exactly this.
• Force majeure should default to a cash refund of the recoverable portion, with a credit note offered as an option, never forced.
• Reserve the right to substitute hotels or sightseeing for reasons outside your control, and refund the difference on any genuine downgrade.
• State plainly that GST and TCS collected are statutory remittances, not refundable cash, and point clients to how they're actually reconciled.
• Require cancellation requests in writing, confirm receipt in writing, and keep vendor cancellation invoices on file for every package.
• Never refund one client and deny an identical claim from another: that inconsistency is what turns a routine dispute into an unfair trade practice finding.