Experiences provides three different ways for customers to reserve an experience with you.

Option 1: Prepay
Use this option if you want to take payment at the time of booking. Your customer will be required to complete the entire checkout process, including payment before they can reserve their Experience with you.

As a merchant, you will receive an email notifying you of a prepaid booking.

Option 2: Reservation
Use this option if you want to charge for an Experience but don't want to take payment until the customer arrives to check-in. You will need to use the Shopify POS to look up their reservation and take payment through the POS.

As a merchant, you will not receive an email notifying you of a reservation booking but you can see a draft order in the Shopify dashboard.

Please note that the Experiences app automatically creates a draft order when the customer books a reservation because you will take payment later. Shopify does not automatically send out emails letting you know that you have a draft order so you either need to check daily in the Experiences admin or POS or use an app such as Draft order reminders to stay abreast of reservations.
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Option 3: Free
Just like the name suggests, use this option if you don't want to charge for your event. You can choose to check in your customers using the Shopify POS at the time of the Experience even though you're not taking payment. 

Please note that an Experience cannot have more than one payment type. e.g. If you have made it a Free event it can't also be a Prepay event. Also, once an Experience has bookings/reservations using a certain Payment type, you cannot change it to another type.