VRBO Withdrawals Money in response to Guest Credit Card Dispute

[Kyler J Sloan]

So, a guest who booked my place but did not show up apparently filed a credit card dispute to get their money back, and I am now discovering that the financial institution that VRBO has partnered with is going to withdraw this money directly out of my account with no due diligence and give it back to the guest. I reached out to them, and I have no recourse to stop this.

Has anyone else had this happen? 

I am fairly certain I am going to remove my listings off of VRBO after this. 

[Alex Scattareggia]

Quote from @Kyler J Sloan:

So, a guest who booked my place but did not show up apparently filed a credit card dispute to get their money back, and I am now discovering that the financial institution that VRBO has partnered with is going to withdraw this money directly out of my account with no due diligence and give it back to the guest. I reached out to them, and I have no recourse to stop this.

Has anyone else had this happen? 

I am fairly certain I am going to remove my listings off of VRBO after this. 

What is the financial institution in question here? 

Unfortunately, this is the cost of doing business with the OTA´s.  I know delisting is the gut reaction.  But I would look at a few things first. 

1. How much business are you doing through VRBO as a percentage of your total revenue?

2. If you lost all of that revenue tomorrow how easily could you replace it? Are you getting a different demographic from VRBO vs. Airbnb etc. 

3. What percentage of VRBO bookings have you lost to cancelation (either full refund or partial in line with your cancelation policy)

With those three numbers you can really calculate how big of a risk you are taking with your business continuing to list there and determine if its worth it. 

Quick anecdote. We do a substantial amount of our business through Booking.com which is even worse as far as host protection and we have also had some pretty rough cancelations.  But when we did that analysis above, we realized that we were keeping about 88% of our booking income after factoring in charge backs.  We also realized that the business we were getting there was unique compared to the rest of our lead sources (lots of Europeans and South Americans in our case) and that it would be difficult to replace that business.  So instead of de listing ourselves we simply increased our prices on that platform in line with the cancelations and felt a lot better making sure that it was still ¨worth it¨ for us to be listed there.  For some people they don´t mind losing the business just for the peace of mind.  

Sometimes things warrant changing the business model, and sometimes they are just the cost of doing business.  It really is a case by case choice.  

Sorry to hear about the chargeback, that always sucks. Good luck!