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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Charge it back via your bank and explain the situation. Worst case scenario, it gets denied, you don't lose anything either way.

The initial misunderstanding was cleared up just one hour after the booking - it should be very reasonable for the host to offer a full refund, it's not like it was a last-minute cancellation where the host would struggle to get it rebooked in time and lose out. The host is clearly being malicious here and trying to make a quick buck by double-dipping - getting some money from the cancelled booking and then relisting the property back on the market.

I am always surprised how many people don't know about payment card disputes/chargebacks or refuse to use them, even right here on HN. The bank and card networks are biased towards you to begin with, and there's no downside to losing one as long as you're not being outright fraudulent or acting in bad faith.

Card chargebacks (or litigation, if you have the means) is the only thing companies understand, especially in a country where consumer protection isn't a thing.

View on HN

An important thing to remember is that the chargeback doesn't necessarily absolve you of the legal need to pay.

Just because the credit card company claws the money back doesn't mean that a merchant can't come after you in court/debt collection.

It's not common, but for a big enough transaction, there's nothing stopping a business from coming after you.

Likewise there’s nothing preventing you from suing the scammy host in small claims court. You probably won’t get the money for a while, but once you get the real estate lien you’ll see it sooner or later.

Are you sure there isn't an arbitration clause hiding somewhere in the tos?

“You and Airbnb each retain the right to seek resolution of the dispute in small claims court as an alternative to arbitration.”[1] Also I don’t think that applies if you sue the host directly.

[1] https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2908#23

On a related know, I wonder if an Airbnb can effectively sue you or there is some kind of mediation clause

Perhaps take AirBnb or the "host" to small claims court

Don't forget they've already collected a digital copy of your ID so that it's easier to let them track you down to sue you. [On sign up]

Suing someone across state lines for a small amount like 1k is not really worth it in most scenarios if the host is the one that tries to sue you. If its air bnb i don't think a jury would find they deserve the money if it was cancelled within 1 hour of booking due to a misunderstanding.

This would never go to a jury trial, this would be a small claims court thing.

It wouldn't even get anywhere near there for multiple reasons:

1) once a competent human (and not a third-world boiler room which is what "customer service" is in any large tech company nowadays) looks into it, they may very well make a reasonable decision and rule in the guest's favor to begin with

2) even if they were in the right from a legal/contractual point of view, they'd spend more flying someone out to argue the case in court than to just take the loss right away, so there's still no point defending the case.

3) Airbnb and maybe even the host have skeletons in the closet they'd rather not draw any attention to (search for Airbnb horror stories and you'll notice how they happily profit from obvious, brazen scams and effectively engage in fraud or false-advertising including about their insurance service, and a significant chunk of hosts break their local laws with regards to short-term rentals and/or taxes, which is the only way to make their pricing attractive), so it would be suicide for them to willingly draw any more attention to themselves than they need to.

I'm not a lawyer but for an amount that small the only suing anyone would be doing is in small claims court. And for that amount the 'host' would have to do it themself as the settlement isn't even attorney's fees. Small claims are usually <$5000. As for sending for collection, you have to set up an account with a collection agency, not usually free, do a lot of paperwork and get some percentage of the original fee. Unless she does this a lot and already has a collection agency account it's big PITA for a few hundred bucks. And in this case it's not like the OP is just going to say, "Oh - OK, here you go."

Plus OP has an excellent story to post as a review since as a 'paying' customer clearly has standing in the matter.

AirBnB has gotten so much bad press over their nit-picky extra charges, fees and required cleaning by guests I would not be surprised if they encourage the 'host' to reconsider their position.

It reverse the burden of legal action. If you do nothing you have 100% chance of paying, if you successfully charge back you have 0.01% chance of being brought to court and end up paying the same amount.

> An important thing to remember is that the chargeback doesn't necessarily absolve you of the legal need to pay.

This is a misconception that many people have - at least in the US market. I owned an MSP for about a decade, and this was often the most common surprise for merchants: charge backs were final and were actually pre-accepted by the merchant as part of their merchant agreement (it's similar in concept to binding arbitration).

If (in the US) you find yourself being collected after a chargeback... have your lawyer get their hands on the merchant agreement. There are some fantastic consumer protections there.

I can’t find any reliable sources on this either way, but some blogspammy sites suggest that merchants are within their rights to pursue legal action outside of the credit card channels

Sure and I am in my legal right to sue you for making this post.

It doesn’t mean it will go anywhere if we actually end up in court.

If you'd like to verify what I've suggested, the best thing to do would be to read a merchant agreement and the associated card association rules. From what I saw when our merchants went after consumers, the outcome was usually bad for the merchant if the consumer had a lawyer. Most of the time, it was as simple as the thing that justified the charge back was unjust enough they were going to lose in court anyway. Failing to provide service, selling defective products, or having unfair (and often illegal) terms in your contract are not going to win.

Where you do see merchant success is where credit cards are being used to make installment payment and the customer stops paying with the card.

worst case for something like airbnb is gonna be small claims court and +$200 for court costs max and/or collection company.

Airbnb won't sue them since it's not their money. Host won't sue them since they would be laughed out of court for trying to recover a thousand bucks for nothing.

I have heard of companies reacting to a chargeback in situations like this by banning your account.

I don't think this person will use Airbnb ever again anyway.

Not a huge issue probably because after loosing that much money I'd be surprised if they ever use AirBnb again.

See my other comment elsewhere, but they did not ban me even though I did a chargeback and won.

Imagine being banned from Best Western, for example, because you disputed a charge!

Having a dispute, especially one which is so reasonable like this, being grounds for banning is insane to me. Companies as large as Airbnb cannot be just banning whoever they want.

This whole notion of, we don't agree with you, so we'll just ban you thing has got to stop.

Companies want you to file the dispute through their support system using their existing process.

Once you file a dispute through the credit card company, the dispute process is moved to the credit card company and now the company has a LOT less power on what might be happening. They also get severely impacted from having a high amount of charge back and hurts them the next time they want to negotiate their credit card rate.

So from a market perspective, it makes total sense for a company to ban you. You're causing them problems, refuse to follow procedure on how to handle the dispute, and hurt their bottom line in ways that could impact them at the rate of millions of dollar. They would rather not have you as a customer at all than deal with you again. Statistically, a customer that uses charge back is a lot likely to end up using it again, so they avoid themselves future trouble as well.

He did follow BnB dispute procedure and gave them a chance to overrule the host's unreasonable stance. But BnB conspired with the host to screw him over and should bear the consequences.

Yes, and he should issue a chargeback, and then bear the consequences of AirBnB no longer doing any business with him in response.

A chargeback is the burn-all-the-bridges, fuck-you-pay-me nuclear option, and you will be banned from any business that you use it against. You should not use it against any business you intend to patronize in the future.

While a possibility given the weird nature of SV companies, it's also pretty much nonsense in general when company support systems break down. It's the sort of learned helplessness that some people promote relative to companies that seems pretty silly. I've certainly used chargebacks when something wasn't working and continued to deal with said companies, albeit rarely.

Yes, sometimes you need to break relationships with certain companies as well. But that should be fine in general.

> Yes, and he should issue a chargeback, and then bear the consequences of AirBnB no longer doing any business with him in response.

I struggle to think that a person should bear literally any consequences if they weren't in the wrong, which AIUI in this case he isn't.

Why do you think a non-monopoly business should be compelled to continue to serve a customer that does chargebacks against it?

You can fire that business as a vendor, they can fire you as a customer.

For the same reason we protect whistle-blowers; if a person has a reasonable problem with a business, we'd like to avoid the business retaliating because that creates incentives that protect bad actors.

How can they avoid future trouble by not refunding a 1 hour cancel? The next person who makes a similar mistake will chargeback too, unless they aren’t aware of it. For a company, the only way out of it is to stay within common sense, because that’s what all their clients have in common.

Their clients are the Hosts.

Silicon Valley scum relies on a lot of people not knowing their rights to open a dispute/chargeback. Seems to be a winning strategy considering even on here most people don’t seem to be aware of this option.

Not Home Depot. Their support representative was worthless for an online order that was never delivered (lost in transit). They advised me to do a charge back. Luckily, it was an online chat, so I screen capped that to add to the CC docs you have to submit.

Blows my mind; reshipping the item would (given they sell it for a profit) cost HD less than me doing a 100% chargeback, and it would be better customer service. I guess they use the friction of doing a chargeback to be their fraud prevention.

Oh my goodness, I had the exact same experience with Home Depot. But then they responded to the chargeback and said it was delivered and no going back and forth with American Express would get them to help. I closed my AmEx card and am deeply skeptical of doing business with Home Depot.

Haha, same here. A package was never delivered (though the tracking number said that it was). Home depot representative couldn't resolve the issue, and recommended to make a charge back. After I made a chargeback, HD contacted the bank with a supporting package (receipt, tracking number, etc) and reversed the charge back. At this point I decided not to waste any more time for $50 item and moved on.

> to add to the CC docs you have to submit.

The only time I made a charge back the CC company actively told me to not add any documentation.

So we need to externally regulate this market... cool.

> You're causing them problems, refuse to follow procedure on how to handle the dispute

It sounds to me like they refuse to follow the law.

> So from a market perspective, it makes total sense for a company to ban you.

From a contract point of view, merchants who ban consumers for charge backs are in violation of card association rules.

> refuse to follow procedure on how to handle the dispute

The merchant agreed to accept charge back rulings when they signed their merchant agreement. The chargeback process is a pain for consumers - they have to do a quite a bit of paperwork to file one.

> Statistically, a customer that uses charge back is a lot likely to end up using it again

A business that forces consumers into charge backs and loses deserves the charge back. Consumers don't automatically win. Source: owned an MSP for about a decade.

BTW, Visa, MC, AMEX and others can fine and ban merchants who fail to comply with card association rules (including chargebacks). Likewise, card associations can also cancel cards on consumers who file abusive charge backs.

Best Western hotels are individually owned and operated, and Best Western itself does not lose any money from chargebacks, the motel owner does. Best Western gets paid their 10% to 15% of gross revenue royalty either way from the hotel owner.

Hotel owners, however, can and do ban individuals for chargebacks.

Hotel owners will in general not screw a potential customer for an honest mistake like this, so maybe the chargebacks actual hotels get actually do warrant a ban compared to VC-funded scammers.

Uh yeah that absolutely can happen. Car rental companies are known to ban people who do chargebacks. If you refuse to pay a business what they think you owe then there’s a decent chance they won’t want future business from you.

Isn't the charge-back lower stakes than actually suing them? Because that would be the only alternative left, the charge-back is the third-party arbitration.

You should not be issuing chargebacks all the time. Most businesses will resolve without resorting to that. Airbnb absolutely failed here.

Generally, companies of any size can choose not to do business with you. What's wrong with that?

If you disagree, you need to change the definition of "utility" then; a utility such as an electricity company can't just cut you off for no reason.

And almost all the companies in the US can choose to not do business with you. That doesn't make it fair or just.

> have heard of companies reacting to a chargeback in situations like this by banning your account

Reporting this back to your bank, better yet, with your state financial regulator and maybe a federal copied, usually gets this swiftly reversed.

I am curious how this would work. I have not heard of a US government forcing a business like AirBnb to do business with a customer unless there was a violation of discrimination against a protected class.

I think it's less about forcing them to do business and more about the regulator/consumer protection agency getting wind of what is obviously malicious and potentially illegal behavior from the company - a lot of companies will fold when a case gets anywhere near litigation/consumer protection/arbitration just to not attract attention.

In this case, the chargeback was just the last resort solution for the customer because they were stonewalled by customer "service", but they otherwise didn't want to chargeback and would rather just be able to cancel their booking properly and keep using the service.

Sure, but refusing to do business with someone is legal in most cases.

> refusing to do business with someone is legal in most cases

Consumer protection law has limited anti-retaliation protection. Banks also want to know if unsavoury behaviour is being suppressed.

Nobody must do business with anyone else. But banning after someone exercises a consumer right in respect of potential fraud you facilitated (and profited off) is not something one wants scrutinised.

I'm confused by the banning comments. Can't you just create a new account with a new payment method and different email address?

Maybe I still have too much of that 90's internet mentality, dunno.

It should be trivial to ban a certain billing address, plus a lot of companies require SMS 2FA now, and most people do not have multiple phone numbers to burn. Besides that, I think AirBnb might require you to upload government issued photo identification too, but I am not sure.

They use heuristics, but yes in general you can work around them if you're persistent enough.

>It should be trivial to ban a certain billing address,

Everything is trivial when you aren't the one who actually has to implement it.

If you ban a billing address: what if someone else moves to that address?

With the same name? I think the probability is low enough to accept the false positive.

How fuzzy of a name check are you doing?

If I get banned as Joe Smith and address X, what if I register my new account as Joseph Smith?

Haha. I had the same reaction. Clearly this person has never had to deal with addresses in a database.

There are any number of ways to represent the exact same address (apt vs. unit vs. suite vs. '#', 5 digit zip vs. 9- digit zip, st. vs. street), and there are cases where the same address serves multiple people (private/virtual mail boxes). A billing address is a loose identifier at best.

Surely almost everyone does address standardization on user inputted fields, right? You'd be silly not to do this.

But generally, you don't need to agree to it. (Which may or may not work if it's just standardized as the back-end.)

I have a couple slightly different addresses. One of which is probably 30+ years old but is still used by the two local telcos and a few local businesses.

I wonder how that's handled now... last I hear the USPS had a database on CD-ROM you could get. Wonder if its api based now?

We used to run 'zip correct' jobs for large merchants at the service bureau I worked at just out of high school. Just 'correcting' thousands/millions of addresses at a time.

You try, but sometimes you have to accept addresses as written.

Again, it just isn’t that easy.

PMB 123 456 Main st.

May or may not be the exact same mailbox as:

Suite 123 456 Main st.

My official address is on “XXXX Boxwood Cres”. Not Boxwood Cr., not Boxwood Crescent, not “Boxwood Cres.”

Of course all of those will work for mail, but if I want to transfer the deed, or do anything of legal relevance, the government needs the address to be exactly like the first one.

For every way you can think of trying to standardize it, there is an exception.

Half addresses, letters in addresses, addresses with no number, etc. All this and we haven’t even left the US yet, other countries have their own variety of whacky shit.

When I bought my house, there was actually some legal paperwork around XXXX Main St. and XXXX N. Main St. being the same thing. (It got changed at one point in the now distant past probably when the interstate cut off the old N. Main St (which exists as a short stub)).

Verizon, Comcast, and some local businesses like my propane delivery still use N. Main and I would periodically get scolded when I first moved in pre-GPS because I would give businesses coming to my house my official USPS address which was different from what was still on many maps.

Myths that programmers believe about reality:

- Only one person can live at an address

- Two people with the same name can't live at the same address (Jr/Sr)

The one I learned on Wall St. in the 80s: SSN are not always unique or available.

Both of these myths are generally edge case enough that they're an acceptable loss to the company.

You need to verify your account with an ID or passport

Personal experience shows you can typically use the same payment method and often even the same email address (with a different alias) to get around most bans. You'll get the odd place where this doesn't work, usually because they're implementing IP bans instead of just user bans. Bans are typically, at worst, a minor inconvenience for the person/party receiving it.

> IP bans

VPN to the rescue!

A VPN would already be banned or be considered a high-risk to begin with.

You'll need a clean, residential IP. Thankfully if you're on a dynamic IP all you need to do is restart your router, or just use your phone as pretty much every carrier only uses dynamic IPs for mobile devices.

A lot of people will not consider this, or will attempt it and be defeated by simple methods (e.g trying a new email address but the same number, getting _that_ address burnt in the process).

So you use another email address next time if you must

And phone number, and fake name and address (you can do very creative things with billing addresses and have it still match - the matching is very fuzzy).

But yes, these companies will lie and break the law when it suits them, no reason to feel bad about giving them a taste of their own medicine.

And nothing of value was lost.

Yeah, but if I have to file a chargeback, I probably don't want to do business with them again anyway.

Uber, others, ban you on a chargeback immediately.

Heck, years ago Uber used to ban you for having an old credit card on the account and trying to book a ride - no warning that the payment method had a problem, just boom, banned. Procedure for resolving was apparently sending a picture with the physical card (showing just the last 4 digits) that was on the account, but since it'd been changed months before I didn't have it and didn't care enough to pursue unbanning.

I think the card was replaced after a Home Depot breach, but not sure. Was definitely in or prior to 2015.

Firing your customers is not a good long term strategy.

It very often is. Not firing certain ones can often be catastrophic.

I would be fine with that. The problem is both with the host and AirBnB, neither of which I would want to do business with again after this.

Accomplishing such a ban would be hard very to do. I'm taking here as an engineer working with a big company and a big data system. Conceptually the idea you could have a 'blacklist' of numbers you will refuse to serve seems easy enough. In practice it would cost a lot to put such a thing in place. First, how are you going to identify the blacklisters? Can't use credit card numbers. Revoke their membership card? You can do that. Going to use their name? Hah! An email address would be pretty good but, darn - it's really easy to get an email address.

And to what end? To be a dick? To piss off the false-positive customers your system inevitably flags incorrectly? There are reasons it's hard to have an accurate, effective no-fly list and that list costs a lot to maintain.

> here are reasons it's hard to have an accurate, effective no-fly list and that list costs a lot to maintain.

There's also the part where the merchant agreed to abide by chargeback rulings and not ban the cardholder.

Isn't government ID upload a requirement for AirBNB?

A ban is very easy to do, what you're describing is a ban unable to be circumvented. Most customers will give up with a small amount of effort - ban their email address and phone number and they'll give up.

If you're a company that collects and collates govenment IDs and their associated addresses, names, etc (which AirBNB are), then you can build something much closer to an uncircumventable ban.

The purpose for such a list is generally to remove low value, high cost customers who rate too high on your risk meter.

Personally I'd never want to use AirBnB ever again if I lost 900$ and they didn't care at all about good customer service.

lol who cares if airbnb cancels your account? There are a million other ways to get a room . I mean it's convenient and I use it but it wouldn't be the end of the world if they banned me.

Probably just removes the temptation of using the shitty service again. Not a huge loss.

One danger of chargebacks: companies may ban your account or otherwise treat your activity as fraud. It can be extremely difficult to get through to a person to correct the situation.

I know a couple folks who still can't use Lyft, for instance, because they charged back an NYC Citibike subscription. You can allegedly cancel a Citibike subscription by contacting customer support — but after no response, they issued a chargeback and Lyft banned them a couple days later. Since the accounts are tied to the phone number, they simply can't use the service.

Support actually managed to reverse the ban for a few days, but then it was re-triggered (presumably by some automated system).

Get a new phone number/email/etc. These companies will lie to you when it’s convenient, no reason not to lie back if it becomes convenient for you.

However, in this case I don’t believe the author will ever want to do business with this disgusting company, so nothing of value will be lost.

It is cute to think that a person who was scammed on Airbnb for $950 where Airbnb refused to help resolve a blatant scam would even touch Airbnb again.

I don't think I would want to ever use Airbnb after that experience so charging back would be worth it.

Why would you want to keep using a service that just ripped you off anyway?

Getting yourself banned off of Airbnb for $950 doesn't sound optimal unless you are swearing off short term lodging around the world (outside of hotels) for the foreseeable future. That's one of the negative externalities of capture-the-market VC investing - getting banned on one of these platforms cuts you off from almost the entirety of supply because of how marketplace dynamics work.

If this is how the service is going to work - why would I want to be part of it? I'm not interested in playing some VC's network effects game.

The era of free money is over for now, they're going to want business soon.

You assume you have a choice in playing. Most of the supply will never consider listing on multiple marketplaces, because its a massive hassle. $ABNB is up 48% YTD bucking the rest of the market, they have strong financials and are massively profitable. The growth-at-all-costs play DID work, and now you have no choice but to bend the knee. Edge cases like this will never materially affect their business.

Just have a friend use their account. Or make a new account. Or use VRBO or a number of Airbnb’s competitors. Or use a sock Airbnb account to connect with a host and then negotiate directly.

There was a thread this week (?) about how AirBNB will ban you for traveling with a banned person

> how AirBNB will ban you for traveling with a banned person

Why do they need to know?

Great, maybe they get banned too and it's two less people playing a stupid game. I'm not going to tell anyone else how to live their lives, but cowering on my knees to tech bureaucracy out of San Fransisco is not how I'll live mine.

> $ABNB is up 48% YTD bucking the rest of the market

Thats pretty cherry-picked, and I wouldn’t look to stock price to make the conclusions you’ve shared. Lots of growth companies are bouncing back after being oversold last year. As another cherry-pick, it’s also down nearly 50% from its 2021 high.

I've never been a host so can't speak for multiple listings, though there seem to be a ton of services that try to market to multichannel listing, so "never" seems a pretty strong word here?

But, if the interwebs are correct, airbnb has 7 mil rentals, booking - 6 mil rentals (vacation specifically, not hotels) and vrbo - 2 mil

https://hosttools.com/blog/short-term-rental-tips/vrbo-vs-ai...

whatever advantage airbnb has, they are no longer the only game in town *

* depends on the town

There are lots of alternatives. Agoda, Booking.com, and many similar sites offer short-term apartment rentals. Also, in much of the world outside the US, hotels are a better and surer bet than short-term apartment rentals.

Look at it like this: Would you pay $950 for the privilege of using AirBNB? I sure wouldn't. An "AirBNB Membership fee" on the order of $950 should seem absurd.

The alternatives are often better than airbnb too.

Even in the US, hotels are better and cheaper than airbnbs

For one person maybe. Otherwise not in my experience.

For most people I can't imagine that keeping AirBnB "happy" is so important that you wouldn't try to get $1000 back. But, yes, it's a problem when keeping AirBnB, Google, Twitter, etc. placated requires rolling over.

it was the case when they were the hot new disruptor. By now there are alternatives for house/apartment rentals, so they can't dick around and rip people off like that anymore. They've been called out on "cleaning fees", at some point may be forced to implement a sane cancelation window as well.

I doubt that after such an experience you'll want to use Airbnb again.

I would absolutely end any customer relationship with Airbnb for a $950 host scam. If they can’t fix that they don’t deserve your business and you are better off off their platform.

If a service stole $950 from me, the last thing I would be worried about is getting banned from the service

They would not get a single cent from me for the remainder of my life and in fact I would do plenty of things to cost them business at any chance I will get.

AirBNB is also not the only short term rental option out there. E.g. Vrbo

Maybe your market is different, but Airbnb is hardly a monopoly on either short term housing or vacation rentals these days. The entire travel booking industry has caught up.

Similarly to the OP, both my wife and I had to pull teeth for weeks to get the full refunds we were entitled to after booking airbnb units. We both had dozens of stays and 5 star reviews under our belts prior to those experiences, dating back through 2013. In my case, it was a unit that the host admitted was infested with rats prior to arrival. In my wife’s, it was a unit that didn’t remotely match the photos of the listing.

At this point it’s my very last resort for booking any kind of stay, which is to say I’ve effectively sworn off the service. Since then, I’ve had no trouble finding vacation rentals elsewhere. For $900, yeah, I’d chargeback in a snap.

never doing business with AirBNB is worth every penny.

I will take $950 to never deal with AirBnB, thank you.

They've stold me up twice, I was left in a foreign city with nowhere to sleep. Host simply didn't show up, didn't pick up, just vanished.

Never again.

I was in a very similar situation and requested a charge back through Visa. it got denied after 2 months and AirBnb sent me a stern email saying they will ban my account if I try something like this again.

You make it sound like chargeback is an easy thing to do, with 100% success rate. I tried twice in my life to chargeback, for items not delivered. Both times unsuccessfully. It looks like banks usually side with merchants, because merchants pay them, not the customers, and because companies are generally considered more trustworthy than individuals.

Changebacks aren't guaranteed that your bank or credit card issuers will allow it. I've had a bank tell me several times that I can't do a chargeback when there were fraudulent purchases made on my account on the Playstation Network.

Even better, Sony threatened to ban my account and I'd lose all the content I legitimately purchased if I did a chargeback against them.

I buy physical game copies now and I've found CapitalOne is better at doing chargebacks than my credit union is (guess credit unions aren't all they're cracked up to be in certain aspects)

They aren’t guaranteed, but the author has nothing to lose trying it anyway. I’ve had great success with them personally.

Are you actually likely to win this chargeback? I'm sure that airbnb made the terms very clear in their million page T&C's document...

It will depends on the local laws/regulations that apply to distance-selling and the card network rules. Considering there is clearly no bad faith involved from the buyer (he's not even trying to weasel out of the booking - he was looking forward to use the service he paid for), I'd say he has a good chance.

He paid for a service they didn’t provide. So there is definitely some argument to it.

I guess they could say they will still provide the service? lol

Why would you reduce the transaction to a single sentence and think that overrides a many page fully qualified set of terms agreed upon for service?

You can’t “terms and conditions” your way out of the card network rules which you agreed to when setting up a merchant account to accept card payments - those will take precedence regardless of what your own terms say and generally favor the cardholder.

If it was an Amex card, very likely to win, from my experiences with them.

paying colossal annual fees on a credit card does come with a few perks

edit: they do have cards that have no annual fee. disregard my comment.

I don't know if it counts as a true AmEx, but I have a free one through Wells Fargo

Amex does have at least one free card issued directly from them. I have one. Blue Cash Everyday I think it's called.

Ah fair enough.

Sometimes you get one free through employers too.

My AmEx card doesn't have any annual fees.

I don't have Amex. But higher-tier Visas with annual fees can be worth it for a variety of reasons if you travel and charge a lot.

I've been with my bank 15+ years, and have a good credit rating.

The one and only time I tried a chargeback, they approved it virtually before I could ask for it. I think they look at your account and see you've been a good customer and give you the benefit of the doubt.

First you should check with your consumer protection laws, where I am from (Brazil) any cancelation fee that is more than 10% of the service value is considered abusive. So you are totally entitled to ask for your chargeback (just be sure to cite the regulation/law your applying) and if AirBnb does any retaliation (as banning your account) you can sue them for that.

This will result in an immediate ban by Airbnb. I got screwed by Oculus and spent almost half a year getting my account back after a chargeback ban.

Don’t ever chargeback big tech. You will lose every time.

Why would you charge back Oculus?

I bought one oculus quest 2 while their site was blowing up during preorders. They shipped and charged me for 3. Nothing showed up on the order page or confirmation email. I didn’t notice the 3 charges until 3 of them were at my door.

A total nightmare to fix. Kinda hard to RMA an item that didn’t show up on my order page. They offered to RMA but no assurances I would get my money back. I didn’t order this many and the screwup was on their end. So in the end I did a chargeback for the 2 I didn’t order.

They banned me. Making my quest useless. I could not make a new account because at the time they were moving to FB and banning people with alt accounts or asking for ID to verify them.

In the end, I undid the chargebacks, sent back the extra two quest units (which I held sealed with no intention of profiting from them and I mailed after the chargebacks) and of course they didn’t refund me for one of them.

I had to keep escalating as they closed tickets. Was close to trying to use HN and internal friends to help. In the end they did a “one time” unbanning. Still lost $400+. Never again.

EDIT: It took me like half a year to resolve this. At first I could not even figure out what happened. I got no email I was banned. Just adding any form of payment failed with an esoteric error message. I’ll never buy direct from any big tech company again. Go ahead and down vote.

> Nicky (from the movie Casino): Where the f** do you get off talking to people about me behind my back going over my head?

I'm guessing if he does a chargeback he gets banned from AirBnB.

This is correct. I had an issue with an Airbnb at some point that Airbnb was struggling to resolve. When I said "whatever, I'll just dispute the charge", the rep said that it is their policy to permanently suspend an account when a user initiates a chargeback. Not "may" but "definitely will". The issue did end up getting resolved after countless phone calls and escalating the issue to supervisors of supervisors but

It doesn't seem like the author intends to use AirBNB ever again, so a chargeback seems like the right solution...

That seems like more a ‘pro’ than a ‘con’

Yes at the very least chargeback gives you leverage.

Don’t do this. Not in America, and not in places with “consumer protection”.

Chargebacks are for fraudulent or erroneous charges, not for “you changed your mind about a purchase”

(1) first up in this case, I’m fairly sure that every other party to the transaction would have grounds to say that the chargeback is fraudulent. The author is not saying that they didn’t make the reservation, they’re saying they realized after entering a contract that the contract was not what they wanted. Similarly the “host” is not breaking the contract: the person agreed to these terms of the contract, apparently having not read them. So this is not a fraudulent transaction, and claiming it is (for a charge back) just sounds like fraud

(2) charge backs are not free to the merchant - as I understand it the merchant is subject to penalties from the processor and/or bank that can easily be hundreds of dollars. So even if the bank doesn’t take you to court for fraud, airbnb maybe unhappy at having to cough up a few hundred dollars.

(3) it seems like (IANAL) your chargeback could also be taken as a breach of contract by the host, and frankly they don’t seem like people who will take a no harm, no foul response to this, especially if they not only don’t get paid but if Airbnb offload any of the chargeback costs.

Fundamentally your running into the reason that there are regulations governing hotels and rental, and why Airbnb insists that in spite of all evidence that is not what they are providing.

This is fraud.

Sadly parent's point is correct. Chargebacks are not to protect from jerks and bad customer service.

If there was a contract you first agreed to, but you find out afterwards that one of the clause is problematic in your case, and the other party is a jerk about it, chances are your card issuer won't even accept the chargeback. Most of the time you need proof that the merchant is the one breaching the contract.

More over most honest businesses would rather you contact them for a refund rather than a chargeback. A chargeback should not be your go to for someone stealing your credit card or whatever as that costs the business (which is itself a victim) money. For Amazon etc that might not matter, but for smaller businesses it can be an expensive event. The payment processors charge them significant fees for any charge back (to “discourage” the need for them). (Ignoring that those companies may sell through Amazon or whatever, and those intermediaries take double digit % of every purchase, but don’t pay a cent of any refund).

Where? Because recall that if it is fraud they can file a criminal complaint, but my reading of this article is that they agreed to a cheaper booking for a stricter cancellation policy, they agreed that they were booking for themselves (afaik a standard condition for airbnbs, if not airbnb the company), and when told that they were required to adhere to the terms of the contract they chose to cancel, under terms they had explicitly chosen.

I’m not saying that I think the host was operating legally, I’m saying I don’t see a fraudulent transaction, I don’t see the host not providing the agreed upon service, nor agreed upon restrictions.

It’s an Airbnb so 50/50 the host is violating a bunch of laws (claiming simultaneously to not be a hotel, motel, or rental unit, etc), but the transaction for the purpose of a chargeback does not appear to be fraudulent on its face.

They lied about not getting cancellation messages from AirBnB for a while, hoping the person would go away and trying to refund $0, then when the person made it very clear they weren't going away, the host denied the cancellation request saying they "couldn't" give a full refund (lie). I'm sure they then turned around a rebooked the room, since it had only been delisted for that date for a couple of hours. To recap, they lied, cheated, stole, and double dipped. It was fraud.

Hoping to see some regulation going into that space pretty soon.

Isn't it fraudulent though? They didn't even use the service.

The other side's argument will be they cancelled the reservation and issued a refund under the agreed policy (so, partial refund only)

No. If you agree to a contract, and then choose to back out of that contract, or not use the service or whatever you agreed to, that’s your choice.

For example: if I rent a car, but then don’t pick it up, the rental agency has not defrauded me. If I buy some food at a restaurant and then don’t eat it all, the restaurant doesn’t owe me a (partial) refund.

If the person believes the host breached their contract, then they can try small claims courts and/or lawyer town.

More realistically given most Airbnb hosts are land lords violating tenancy and hotel regulations it might be worth contacting the local regulatory authorities.

But while you make think the behaviour of the host here is illegal, they placed this person booked was available, and was available under the terms they apparently agreed to, so being told “no you can’t violate the terms you agreed to” is not fraud. This person could still go and stay at this property themselves, they just couldn’t have some other person stay their instead.

Your local laws will dictate what a contract can and can't do, but generally contracts require a "meeting of the minds" and it's up to a court to decide what that means and which clauses are actually enforceable (that's also why we have courts instead of the whole "code is law" crypto-dystopian BS, because not every possible edge-case can be predicted and written in the contract in advance).

In this case the guest did not realize the bookings were nominative, and once he made aware, he wanted to change the booking to the proper person. A shortcoming of the Airbnb platform is that there is no way to transfer a booking to another account, so the only way is to cancel and rebook.

Notice how at no point the guest's intention was to cancel and back out of the deal. The cancellation was suggested by the host themselves being unreasonable and trying to exploit a policy technicality to make a quick buck.

maybe he can sue the host in small claims?

I have definitely had cases though where I've run into "Where did this subscription come from?" and there was no apparent way to cancel. Last was something Yahoo-related a number of years back. Ended up doing a chargeback and canceling the charge.

I would absolutely chargeback in this case. Some non-standard clause WHICH THIS ABSOLUTELY IS RELATIVE TO HOTELS (OR EVEN REGULAR B&Bs) buried in T&Cs somewhere should not be acceptable.

He never changed his mind. He wanted to amend the name on the booking to rectify what is essentially a clerical error. It’s not his fault if the only way to do that through the software is to effectively cancel and make a new booking.

If we’re talking about laws, the law varies between states and countries and just because something is buried in page 59 of a clickwrap agreement nobody reads doesn’t magically mean the case is a slam-dunk - there will be many nuances a court will consider if it actually gets there, which it will not because Airbnb and maybe even the host has way more skeletons hidden in the closet to risk showing up in court over a cancellation fee - in fact the only reason this wasn’t resolved in favor of the guest is because the entire case was offloaded to someone in a third-world country barely capable of speaking English and definitely not paid nor trained enough to understand and care about the situation - so they’re definitely not going to be flying in a lawyer to argue their case for a few hundred bucks in court.

With regards to a chargeback fee, Stripe charges around 30 bucks last time I checked? Far from breaking the bank I would say.

> it seems like (IANAL) your chargeback could also be taken as a breach of contract by the host

I would absolutely pay good money to see that host argue their case in court when the whole dispute started out of them trying to make a quick buck instead of allowing the guest to change their name. However just as the above there is no way they will show up in court considering it’s very likely they’re not even abiding by their local laws when it comes to short-term rentals, and the writing style of “Claire” suggests the whole thing might be a complete scam in the end.

A contract is a meeting of minds. A valid contract requires that both sides know what they're agreeing on.

He thought he was paying for a reservation for a family member, the host and AirBnB thought he was paying for a reservation for himself.

No actual contract was agreed upon here, as the parties did not actually agree on anything.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffles_v_Wichelhaus for one of the earliest examples of case law on this, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_of_the_minds for more general discussion on this topic

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