What every reservation status means

A reservation's status answers one question before anything else: who is being waited on? The colours group the same way, so a column of statuses can be sorted by eye before a word of it is read.

Every status at a glance

These are the real badges, in the colours you will see in your list.

The rest of this article is the same table in words, with the reasoning behind the colours.

Waiting on you

• Booking request — a guest asked and nothing moves until you answer. Amber, the same amber as its bar on the calendar — a request looks the same wherever you meet it. Where it came from shows as a small mark on the bar when there is room. It is a deeper step than the states below, and that step is doing more work than a step should: it is the only thing separating "you must act" from "nobody needs you". Worth fixing with something other than colour.
• Cancellation requested — someone asked to cancel, and the stay is still live until you agree.

Not a status, but on the same board: a closed night is off sale because you closed it or another site's calendar link did. Striped slate on the grid, and the Closed Nights count above the board is now plain, like the other counts. It used to turn amber when some of those nights looked accidental, which put two unrelated things in one colour on the same row: a guest waiting on you, and nights nobody is waiting on. The warning did not disappear — open Closed Nights and the unexplained ones are still flagged inside — but it is one click further away than it was, and that is a fair thing to want back in a form other than colour.

Waiting on the guest

These are amber. Nobody needs you.

• Awaiting payment — you accepted and their card has not gone through. Airbnb uses the same words for the same thing.
• ID required — it cannot proceed until they verify who they are.

You already said yes

• Pre-approved — you approved them in advance and they can book whenever they like. This one is teal, alone in the vocabulary.

It is deliberately not green. No money has moved and the guest may never book, so colouring it like Confirmed would put it among your real bookings and read as revenue at a glance. It is also not amber, because amber means something is waiting on you and here nothing is — you answered.

Going ahead

• Confirmed — booked and paid.
• Checked in — they are in the property right now. The same green as Confirmed, one shade deeper.

Over

• Checked out and Expired are sand: finished, and nobody decided anything. An expiry is a silence, not a rejection.
• Cancelled, Declined, Withdrawn and No show are rose: over, and somebody decided. They end the same way and differ only in whose decision it was, which is what the word carries.

Not a booking at all

• Owner stay — the owner is using their own place. Nights held, no money, nobody to chase.

Awaiting payment is not a Booking request

Worth saying plainly, because it caused real confusion. A reservation can be pending for two different reasons: because a host has to answer, or because a guest's card failed. Those need opposite actions, so they get different names and different colours. Only the first is a request.

Waiting on host, waiting on guest

Under the badge, a second small label says whose move it is: Waiting on host or Waiting on guest. It appears only while somebody actually owes an answer — a confirmed or finished stay gets none, because "waiting on nobody" is just noise on the screen.

The words are the same on both sides, and deliberately name the *role* rather than saying "you". A phrase that means a different person depending on who is looking cannot be quoted in a message or a support conversation without first working out whose screen it came from. Both of you reading "Waiting on host" and meaning the same person is the whole point.

Your guest sees the same badge

The status now appears on the guest's own reservation card, next to the property name, in the same words and the same colour you see. If your list says Booking request, that is the phrase they are reading too.

This matters when you talk to a guest about their booking: the badge on their trip says what yours says. It also means a guest can tell at a glance that their request has not been answered yet, without opening anything.