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Vacation Rental deposit refund?

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skyestarz37

Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? PA

I reached out to a person who owned a vacation rental in another state. She agreed to send us a confirmation and we agreed to send a good faith deposit of $400 to "hold" the unit. We asked her to send us a rental agreement, but she didn't.

Before we received a confirmation for the rental, we had an issue that forced us to contact the owner to let them know we could not complete the rental. The owner of the vacation property didn't contact us for three days afterward. When the owner finally did, she said she would send us a refund, but then decided not to. She later said she re-rented the unit but that it was at a loss to her. She eventually offered a small portion of our deposit back, claiming she was retaining the remainder for damages she suffered due to the cancellation.

We were not informed of her cancellation policy and we had no written agreement (or verbal or anything else) that said she was going to keep our deposit no matter what.

I'm accustomed to apartment rental situations, where a landlord is not entitled to retain funds unless there is a stipulation that he/she can do this based upon a written agreement. For instance, my old rental contracts used to inform renters that if the renter failed to perform, all of the monies currently paid would be retained as liquidated damages.

We used a credit card to make the payment and we disputed the charge with paypal first. They refused to intervene because the transaction was outside of ebay and was considered "virtual" or "intangible". We have now disputed the charge with our credit card.

The only real agreement we had was payment terms. We agreed to send a good faith deposit, which we did. The landlord did not send a confirmation, and then we explained we couldn't keep the rental so we did not send more money.

I'm not confident that we will be successful with the credit card because there's no real merchant here, it's just a private person. Figuring we may have to go to small claims. Are we correct in our thinking; that without a contract that stipulated cancellation terms we are entitled to our deposit back?
 


swalsh411

Senior Member
You will lose. You did have a contract, albiet a verbal one. You do not have any rights to a refund if this was not stipulated. You are the ones who backed out; not her.
 

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