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

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 business should be compelled to continue to serve a customer that does chargebacks against it?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Firing your customers is not a good long term strategy.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

You need to verify your account with an ID or passport

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).

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

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

> 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 all kinds of anti-retaliation protection. Banks also want to know if unsavoury behaviour is being suppressed.

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

Consumer protection law has all kinds of anti-retaliation protection. Banks also want to know if unsavoury behaviour is being suppressed. Nobody must do business with anyone else. But banning someone after they exercise a consumer right in respect of potential fraud you facilitated (and profited off) is not something you want scrutinised.

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.

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.

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.