Real Estate Investor · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2016 · 286 posts · 67 votes
Hi, Fellow STR operators
I have a question on fraudulent payments from STR guests and wonder whether you all have a standard practice dealing with such situations:
We have some units in the rough part of the town and we have to deal with many interesting situations. One of them is fraudulent payments. For example, we have a guest booked for two weeks. After they checked in for two days, we got the notice from Stripe (the processing payment we use for bookings from VRBO and booking.com ) saying the the bank is disputing the charge as fraudulent. So, what is the best practice for such situation? We do have the front desk in the building that checks the photo from the ID matches the person and the name on ID with that in our system. We only send door codes to registered emails of the booking channel.
After they checked in for two days, we got the notice from Stripe (the processing payment we use for bookings from VRBO and booking.com )
Don't these platforms process their own payments? AIR and VRBO police their own guests payments as far as I know. Who is Stripe? Anyway, I've never had the problem either......?
If someone issues a charge back, they can win and Airbnb won't fight it for you. I've experienced this myself and lost $3000. First charge back Airbnb said oh we will fight it. Customer simply issued a 2nd one, Airbnb said, we can't do anything about it. Sorry. I was horrified.
Real Estate Investor · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2016 · 286 posts · 67 votes
4y
We got them out, telling them that we will cancel the reservation and it will be trespassing and police will be called. I think as counties start to resume eviction process, we will have more of this type of guests. They reported fraudulent charges on the booking one day after they checked in.
Now, we added an online checkin process that will require guests to upload their IDs. Hopefully this extra step will deter some squatters.
After they checked in for two days, we got the notice from Stripe (the processing payment we use for bookings from VRBO and booking.com )
Don't these platforms process their own payments? AIR and VRBO police their own guests payments as far as I know. Who is Stripe? Anyway, I've never had the problem either......?
Bruce
For VRBO and Booking.com, you could choose to either use their payments or your own payment processing method, which is Stripe for our case. In this way, you could charge guests 100% at reservation, refund them, add extra charge, add your taxes in the invoices or send them invoices to pay based on your own policies. The downside is that you need to have manpower to process payments and fight disputes.