Booking and paying

Pick your dates and your party, then tap Reserve. That writes a pending booking and holds those nights on the calendar so nobody else can take them while you decide.

The hold lasts 48 hours and costs nothing. Nothing has been taken from you, no card has been touched, and you can let it go at any hour for nothing. If you do nothing, the hold releases itself and the nights reopen, without touching a night the agent had closed by hand.

If somebody pays for those exact nights a moment before you, the database refuses the overlap and you are told the dates were just taken. Two people cannot hold the same night here.

The person paying is often not the person staying: a sister in London pays for a cousin flying into Lagos. You can name the guest who will arrive, with their phone number, and that is what the agent and the gate get. Leave it blank and the booking is yours.

• Minimum stay. If the agent takes bookings of three nights or more, a two-night request is refused, and the message names the number so you know which way to move.
• Party size. A place that takes four guests refuses a party of eight, on the same principle, at the moment you reserve rather than at the gate.
• Dates already taken. Pick different dates.

Checkout is the nightly side of the marketplace: a shortlet, a hotel room or anything else let by the night. A yearly tenancy is settled on its own terms with the agent, and a sale or a lease is negotiated, so neither passes through this screen. What follows is what the nightly path shows you, in naira:

• The rate multiplied by the nights. Written out, so you can check the arithmetic.
• Cleaning, only when the agent charges for it.
• The total. Nothing hidden inside it.

On a yearly tenancy the equivalent figure is the move-in total, printed on the listing before you ever message anybody: the rent plus caution, agency, legal and anything else payable before the keys change hands. It exists for the same reason this breakdown does, which is that the number people actually have to find is the only number worth advertising.

There is no platform line, because the platform takes nothing. The amount you are charged is the amount stored on the booking, worked out from the price on the listing at the moment you reserved. It is never taken from your browser, so it cannot be edited on the way through, and the price cannot move under you between reserving and paying.

Card. You are taken to a hosted checkout run by a licensed Nigerian payment processor, where you pay with a Nigerian debit card or a bank transfer the processor raises. We never see or store your full card number. Your booking carries a payment reference from the moment you start, so support can trace it if anything goes wrong.

Wallet. If your balance covers the total, pay in one tap. That single action debits the wallet, records the payment, writes the ledger row, confirms the booking, and closes the nights, all in one database transaction. It either all happens or none of it does, because a half-paid booking is the worst state this platform could hold.

Tap twice on a bad connection and you are not charged twice. Each attempt carries a key, and a retry replays the first answer instead of taking your money again.

A listing marked Instant is payable straight away. Everything else is a request: you reserve, the agent sees it in their bookings console, and they accept or decline.

Once an agent accepts, the stay is payable. Open it from Bookings and pay by card or wallet exactly as above. A stay an agent has accepted is not paid until you pay it, and the product says so plainly rather than telling you it is settled when the agent has received nothing.

Once the payment settles:

• The booking moves to confirmed and the nights are closed for good.
• The gate details unlock on the listing and on your booking: estate, directions, security number, any access code.
• You get a notification, and an email with the booking on it.
• The agent is told somebody is coming, and who.

Everything after that lives under Bookings: the dates, the address, the price you paid and the reference.

One schedule governs every stay on the platform, and it is written out at Cancellations.

• More than 72 hours before check-in: everything back.
• Inside that window: half back. The other half stays with the agent, whose nights are now very hard to re-let.
• From check-in day onwards:the stay is the agent's.

If the agent cancels, or the property was materially not what was listed, you get everything back whenever it happens. Refunds land in your Vallo wallet, usually within minutes, and you move them to your bank from there.

An unpaid hold is different again: let it go whenever you like, for nothing.

When a stay is finished you can review it: a rating and what it was actually like. The agent can reply once, publicly. Reviews are attached to real completed bookings, which is why the ratings on this platform are worth reading.