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We were going to visit New York from Sydney Australia and in June 2010 looked for a rental apartment in New York for September 2010.
We found a property advertised at HomeAway Holiday-Rentals that was managed by Maaya Sarin and in June 2010 supplied a credit card number for the payment of a deposit. At this stage we had not seen a contract and were relying on the good faith of Maaya, we were not informed that a charge of 5.3% would be applied by Serene Properties for credit card payments.
Shortly after the deposit payment was made a good friend became extremely ill (he died in September 2010) and we requested that our booking be put on hold and asked that no further charges be made on our credit card and explicitly removed the authority to charge anything to the card.
Dear Readers,
Frederik has missed the email that was sent to us saying that he does not wish to cancel, I have pasted below what actually happened.
We went ahead and processed his card for only the first 50% of rent then, he then emailed us on July 17 again stating that he want to cancel, by this time the credit card had already been processed for the first portion of rent due.
We are an honest company and like every business we have certain policies as well that we are bound to follow.
The payment policy is clearly stated in the contract that was signed by him. We only charged the first portion of rent not the total rent even though Frederik was liable to pay the total rent as the cancellation was last minute. The 5.2% processing fee was clearly mentioned in the contract and Frederik was very well aware of it as well (last email on this page proves that)
I sent this email in response to Frederik email asking what the options of cancellation will be:
From: Serene Home 10E
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2010 11:34 AM
To: Frederik Alan-Smith
Subject: Re: URGENT
Hi Frederik, As of today your reservations are solid. Please let me know if you wish to cancel, we have not charged your card for the first portion of rent & will not. But I need to know if your going to be keeping the reservations or not, so I can start to take other bookings. Thanks Maaya
Frederik's replies below:
From: Frederik Alan-Smith
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2010 1:38 PM
To: Serene Home 10E
Subject: Re: URGENT
Hi Maaya, Thanks for your patience - we wont keep you hanging on. We will let you know soon.
regards Frederik
From: "FrederikAlan-Smith"
Subject: Re:URGENT
Date: July 8, 2010 9:19:54 AM EDT To: "Maaya"
Hi Maaya,
Not much we can do to help by cancelling so we are staying on our vacation. Is there another way of paying to avoid the credit-card surcharge? If there isn't an alternate method, please proceed and charge the card.
Thanks Frederik
THE CHARGE WAS MADE AFTER THIS EMAIL WAS SENT TO US.
THANKS TO ALL FOR READING THIS.
Maaya