# Host hold

Source: https://lemon.cy/glossary/host-hold/  
Publisher: Lemon.cy (Red Tribe Media Ltd, Limassol, Cyprus)  
Updated: 2026-09-10 · Verified against production: 2026-09-10

**Short answer:** The "Keep it" action a host takes on a booking flagged as possibly cancelled. It tells Lemon the reservation is real regardless of the feed. A hold is not permanent: after 7 days of continued absence the booking is re-raised for review, never cancelled automatically.

A host hold is a shield, and shields have a failure mode: a booking that really was cancelled can be kept forever, sending a cleaner to an empty flat and lying to the calendar. Lemon's first implementation never cleared the hold; the review-after-7-days rule (`HOST_HOLD_REVIEW_AFTER_MS`) was added when production showed held bookings stale for a month. The principle: any booking kept alive by a shield rather than seen in the feed must become visible to the host as such.

A hold is the right answer when the host has checked the platform and the reservation is there; it is the wrong answer to a feed link that has silently expired, which is why the dashboard also shows when a feed last synced successfully.

## Related

- [Possibly cancelled](https://lemon.cy/glossary/possibly-cancelled/)
- [Does a booking disappearing from an iCal feed mean the guest cancelled?](https://lemon.cy/learn/is-a-disappeared-ical-event-a-cancellation/)