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I recently was looking for hotels online out of the country in a pretty famous and legit online reservation system. Basically the reservation was like reserve now and pay later. The website asked for the credit card number to hold the reservation and it did not ask for the CVV number. But the next day I cancelled my reservation. But the credit card was still charged. The customer service of the booking system said, the charge was according to the hotel policy. My question was since I did not give the CVV number, can I dispute the charges with my credit card bank?

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    " the reservation was like reserve now and pay later" - was it like reserve now and pay later, or was it actually reserve now and pay later? Check the terms and conditions you agreed to; if the transaction was in accordance with terms you agreed to, your bank will (rightly) say there's nothing wrong.
    – AakashM
    Mar 31, 2017 at 11:22

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The dispute will not center around whether you gave the CVV number or not. The dispute comes down to whether you received the service contracted or not. In this case, the service was a reservation of the room. There's an opportunity cost for the hotel if they promise their last room to you, and the next person who wants to book the room books elsewhere. That's what the reservation fee covers, and you would certainly be angry if they gave your room away after you booked it.

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Ditto Nathan L. Let me add:

Whether a charge is legitimate has nothing to do with whether you gave the CVV. Giving a CVV is not considered any sort of authorization. It's not like signing your name or anything.

The question would be, What terms did you agree to, and did they make these terms available to you? Any hotel will have some sort of cancellation policy: how far in advance to you have to cancel to get a refund, and how much of your money do you get back. Some hotel booking are non-refundable, period. Others are pretty generous. If you checked a box saying you have read and agreed to the terms, but in fact you never bothered to read them (like most of us do very often), you have no case if it went to court. Or if the terms were conspicuously posted on the web site with some notation to the effect of "by making a reservation on this web site you agree to these terms", you are probably out of luck. On the flip side, if they are trying to keep your money in clear violation of a posted cancellation policy -- if they said "cancel at least 24 hours before the reservation date for a full refund" and you cancelled 2 days before and now they're trying to not refund your money -- then you'd have an excellent case. And of course in the middle there are hazy cases, where if it went to court a judge would have to decide what was "reasonable".

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  • +1 thanks for chiming in, I probably would have explained more in my answer, but I was on my phone.
    – NL - Apologize to Monica
    Mar 31, 2017 at 18:52

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