Cancellation Policy

The whole policy, in four lines

• More than 14 days before arrival — full refund of the advance. No questions, no form, no admin fee.
• 7 to 14 days before arrival — fifty per cent of the advance refunded.
• Fewer than 7 days before arrival — no refund, subject to the exceptions below.
• Not arriving, without telling us — no refund.

The advance is thirty per cent of the total. The remaining seventy per cent is never taken in advance, so the most you can ever lose is thirty per cent of the stay.

The exceptions, which are real

In each of the following we refund the advance in full, at any notice, including on the morning of arrival:

• Illness — yours, or that of anyone travelling with you. We do not ask for a medical certificate.
• Bereavement.
• A blocked or closed road anywhere on your route. Snow, landslide, or a strike.
• Cancelled or diverted transport that leaves you unable to reach Berinag on your dates.
• A government restriction preventing travel.

We have applied these thirty-one times in ten years and disputed none of them. If you tell us something has happened, we believe you. This is not naivety — it is that the cost of occasionally being wrong is far lower than the cost of becoming the kind of place that demands documentation from someone whose father has just died.

Leaving early

If you leave earlier than planned, we refund the nights you have not used, less one night. The exception is if you are leaving because something here has gone wrong, in which case we refund all unused nights and probably some of the used ones.

If you are leaving because the weather is not what you hoped for, we will refund the unused nights minus one, as above — but please talk to us first. In our experience the guest who wants to leave on day two because there is cloud on the peaks is usually the one who ends up staying six.

Staying longer

Almost everybody asks. Where the room is free, extra nights are charged at the same rate and no admin is involved. Where the room is taken, we will try to move you into another one, and if the house is full we will find you somewhere good nearby and drive you there.

Changing your dates

Moving a booking to different dates is free, once, if you tell us more than fourteen days ahead. The advance transfers in full to the new dates.

Inside fourteen days we will still move it wherever we can — it costs us nothing if we can refill the room, and we usually can outside peak season. If we cannot, the standard refund terms apply to the original booking.

If the new dates fall in a higher season, the difference is payable. If they fall in a lower one, we refund the difference.

If we cancel

Rare, but it happens — a burst pipe, a family emergency, a road closed at our end. In that case:

• You receive everything you have paid, back in full, within forty-eight hours.
• We find you comparable accommodation and pay the difference if it costs more.
• If you have already begun travelling, we cover the reasonable cost of the disruption. We have done this twice and both times we simply asked what it had cost them.

Weather is not a ground for refund

This is the only part of this page that ever causes friction, so it is worth being unambiguous.

We publish the visibility odds for every month. Between October and December the peaks appear on roughly nine mornings in ten; in monsoon, one in ten. Before you pay, we will tell you the realistic expectation for your dates, and we will tell you to come another month if your dates are wrong for what you want — even when saying so costs us the booking.

Having done that, a stay is not refundable because a particular morning was cloudy. What is refundable is a change of mind, in time, under the terms at the top of this page.

Packages and long stays

Packages follow exactly the same terms as room-only bookings.

For stays of twenty-one nights or more the advance is fifteen per cent rather than thirty, and the cancellation window is twenty-one days rather than fourteen, because a month-long booking takes a month-long room out of circulation.

How to cancel

Send a message. That is the entire process.

WhatsApp is fastest and gets you a reply within a few hours. Email stay@berinaghomestay.com works too. There is no form, no portal and no cancellation reference number.

Refunds go back by the route they arrived — UPI or bank transfer — normally within three working days and occasionally within three minutes, depending on whether Deepak is holding his phone.

Travel insurance

We recommend it, particularly for stays that include the high-meadow trek, and particularly if you are flying into or out of Pantnagar, where cancellations are common.

Insurance will cover you for a great deal that we cannot, and it costs a small fraction of the trip. This is the only piece of advice on this website that we would give to somebody who was not coming to stay with us.