How to Book, Cancel, or Change a JellyCarts Reservation
Short version: you text or call, we confirm availability, and nothing hits your card until we've confirmed it. Cancel 24 hours out or more and it's free. Here's the longer version, because the details are where people get nervous.
Two ways in
Reserve for Later is the advance booking. You tell us dates, we check the fleet, we confirm. Because the reservation is made against a specific cart on specific days, we hold advance bookings to a higher charge threshold than walk-ups — a reserved cart goes out at 75% state of charge or better, so a booking made in March for July doesn't turn into someone handing you a half-empty battery.
Rent Now is the walk-up. Same day, whatever's available and ready at the staging area, out the door at 55% charge or better. Good for a spontaneous afternoon; not something to count on for a specific date in August.
Booking: nothing is charged until availability is confirmed
This is the part worth being explicit about. When you text us dates, you are not buying anything yet. We check actual fleet availability against actual dates, and we come back to you with a yes and a price, or a no and the nearest dates that work. Your card isn't charged to find out whether we have a cart.
When you book, the quote you get is all-in — the rental rate plus the $10/day Road Service Plan, plus the parking pass that's already on the vehicle. Not a base rate that grows at pickup. If you want to see how the nightly and weekly numbers break down before you text, we published the whole rate structure.
The deposit is a hold, and we never capture it
Every rental carries a flat $100 authorization hold, whatever you book — the same $100 whoever books, with no exemptions. An authorization hold is your bank setting money aside as pending — it is not a charge, and it releases on its own.
We do not run charged deposits. That's a deliberate operating rule here, not a courtesy extended case by case, and it exists because "deposit" in this industry too often means "money you'll spend three weeks arguing to get back."
Cancelling: free at 24 hours or more
Cancel 24 hours or more before your rental starts and it's free. No fee, no partial retention, no store credit. Text us; that's the whole process.
Inside 24 hours a $100 cancellation fee applies — but text us anyway. A cart we can still re-book is a cart we'd rather re-book than argue about, and the honest answer depends on how close in you are and what the calendar looks like. What we won't do is pretend a policy is more rigid than it is in order to keep money we didn't earn.
Weather and evacuations are their own category. If the island is under a mandatory evacuation order, the normal cancellation window doesn't govern — we wrote up how hurricanes and evacuations work separately, because nobody should be reading a cancellation policy while packing the car.
Changing dates
Text us. Shifting a reservation is usually easier than cancelling and rebooking, and it's more likely to succeed in peak season — moving an existing booking by a day is a much smaller ask of the calendar than finding a brand-new opening in July.
If you're extending, tell us as early as you can. Extensions are the thing most likely to be impossible on short notice in season, because the cart you have may already be promised to someone the day you want to keep it. And check the math before you extend by a night or two — because of how the packages price, there's a point where the full week costs less than the nights you're adding.
When to book
Peak weekends and holiday weeks go first, and half-day slots go before anything else. If your trip depends on having a cart on a specific date, book earlier than feels necessary. If it's flexible, you have more room than you think — especially in the shoulder weeks at either end of the March 15 to November 15 season, when the calendar loosens up. And if what you actually want is a cart by the week or the month, that's a separate product with its own terms — we wrote up how the long-stay rentals work.
Book, change, or cancel: text or call 910-999-2278.