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.