u/Cindy_Bortee

UPDATE: Guest messaged me and told me that he had been trying to pay and the payment was not going through. He said he would call VRBO. I guess he did because the payment was just made, so, phew, deep breath. Thank you very much everyone for your sage advice and support.

Based on some of your comments, I did poke around google a bit and learned that VRBO and something called Hospitable recently "partnered" (whatever that means) and as a result some of the payment processes, and payout processes, have been screwed up. Prob really just another way for VRBO+Hospitable to hang onto guest and host money for a bit longer. Would love to be free of VRBO someday....thank you all for your responses!

Original post: Guest booked back in February for a week-long rental rental that starts in 12 days. We have the payment situation set up so 50% is due at booking and 50% is due 14 days before the rental period. He did pay the first 50%. But his second payment was due a couple days ago. He didn't pay and did not respond to my, "Hey are you still planning to come?" message that I sent in the VRBO message area.

I called VRBO customer support today and they offered that I could cancel the reservation and they would "escalate" it so that the cancellation penalty wouldn't apply to me. They also suggested that I wait until three days before the rental to do this. There was a definite language/communication difficulty with VRBO support today. Grrr.

We have utilized the relaxed cancellation policy which appears to state that guest-made cancellations made fewer than 14 days before the rental result in a 50% refund and guest-made cancellations made fewer than 7 days result in no refund at all.

The VRBO penalty waiver policy appears to state that in order to have a waiver provided to us, I need to issue a full refund to the guest.

My questions are:

1. Will VRBO issue a refund to the guest of any amount of the 50% of the booking fee they've already paid if the guest cancels this reservation? Because the guest only paid 50%, will they get a refund of that 50%? (This seems like a very bad intersection of the payment plan and the relaxed cancellation plan.)
2. Will VRBO issue a payment to us of any amount of the booking fee already paid if the guest cancels this reservation?
3. Should we cancel the reservation and try to book the property again? Summer season is short here and losing a week really does suck.
4. What would you do? Have you ever been through this situation?

Thank you other VRBO hosts.