What happens if a guest disputes a charge?

The guest contacts their bank, the bank reverses the charge, and Stripe asks you for evidence. Because guest payments are made on your own Stripe account and you are the merchant, the dispute is yours. The money comes back out of your balance while it is being decided, and Stripe charges a dispute fee.

We cannot fight it for you. We do not hold the money and we are not a party to the transaction — that is the same arrangement that means we take no commission from your bookings.

What decides a dispute is almost always documentation, so the useful work happens long before one arrives.

Keep the booking confirmation. It names the property, the dates and the amount, and it is the core of your evidence.

Keep your messages. A conversation showing the guest arranging arrival is very hard to argue with.

Make your page unambiguous. A clear total, a clear cancellation policy and a clear property address remove the most common grounds — "I did not know what I was paying for".

Make your billing descriptor recognisable. Your name appears on the guest's statement, not ours. If it appears as something they do not recognise, some disputes are simply confusion, and confusion is avoidable. You set this in your Stripe account.

Genuine card fraud does happen and sometimes you will lose one. Treat it as a cost of taking cards rather than a failure. What you can control is never losing a dispute you should have won because nothing was written down.