Sleepbox

That's nice but for airport what about fixing the real problem, which is that it is so hard to sleep during the flight. More silent planes and hamacs could be the answer.

I never said that the cleanup fee should be buried. In fact, this is all hypothetical. By requiring payment by credit card, you'll hopefully eliminate prostitutes, drug users, and homeless people anyway. At that point, if you make the cleanup fee really obvious to customers, it may be feasible.

And I don't know how common chargebacks for unethical purposes are, but neither me nor anyone I know has ever mentioned using a chargeback in a situation where they weren't genuinely scammed.

In my experience 1% can be too low depending on the size of transactions.

My company charges high monthly subscriptions, and on several occasions we've had people outright lie to credit card companies to get a chargeback. In 3 years of business we've never had a single legitimate chargeback (e.g., fraud, or someone who wasn't satisfied and asked us for a refund that we refused). The few times we have made mistakes in billing, or some other customer satisfaction issue, the customer called us and we initiated a refund.

In my experience the chargebacks increase the more expensive the transaction, i.e., people are more willing to go through the procedure to make $1000 than, $10.

If just one unscrupulous customer attempts to chargeback months worth of fees, it can easily place us over the limit for the month. We had one customer initiate chargebacks going back 6 months. Plus the customers who are likely to use chargeback scams are also likely to spend more than the average customer in the first place. While we've had no where near even 0.1% of customers attempt (7 in 3 years) this--they're have been several months where 1 chargeback brought us near the 1% threshold.

The worst part about chargebacks is how ridiculously stacked it is for the consumer, and they know it. We've even gotten notices to dispute the chargeback that arrived in the mail after the due date.

I've also had friends who sold large ticket items that had thousand of dollars stolen in chargeback scams.

This problem is only going to get worse as more people become aware of how easy chargebacks are for the customer.

>If you find a way to charge a cleanup fee and not surprise and anger customers when doing so, you won't get chargebacks.

Doesn't matter how upfront you are about it. You can make the customer sign a single sheet of paper with "$300 cleanup fee in case of damage" written in 30pt font. If you try to charge a cleanup or damage fee--chances are the customer will initiate a chargeback.

The only customers who are going to get charged a $300 cleanup fee are the customers who don't respect other people's property in the first place--those kinds of people have no problem with illegitimate chargebacks.

nice, but at what point can we get over associating radically new living space ideas with the design ethos of "2001 A Space Odyssey" ?

> they're have been several months where 1 chargeback brought us near the 1% threshold

With volume so low, it's probably not a real threshold for you. Your processor is looking out for their ratio, since they're answerable to Visa/MC for it. If they've been around a while, they're probably very lenient with such small customers. Your little chargeback won't make a dent in their own rate, so better to keep you around until you might grow to a larger, more profitable business for them. If you still get >1% at a higher volume, THEN you're an actual problem for them.

> we've gotten notices to dispute the chargeback that arrived in the mail after the due date

I have too. It sucks but isn't unusual. You really need to get chargeback notices over the web or fax. MSPs that don't offer a web portal will always be able to fax you the notices, so sign up for one of the online fax services and give them your number. You'll be notified when they get the notice instead of days later when it makes it through the postal system.

> chances are the customer will initiate a chargeback

That was my point. The chargeback limits exist, in part, to discourage business models that create widespread dissatisfaction over the payments. In this instance, they would need to find a better way to deter or handle people messing up the beds than charging a fee to a card on file.