What a dispute is
A dispute — your bank may call it a chargeback — is when you ask your bank to reverse a payment you made by card. The bank takes the money back while it looks into it, and then decides who keeps it.
It is a real protection and you are entitled to use it. Nothing on this page is meant to talk you out of one.
Please talk to us first — it is usually faster
A dispute is slow. Banks commonly take 60 to 120 days to decide, and you have no money in the meantime. Most of what people dispute, we can sort out in a day or two:
- Charged the wrong amount, or charged twice — tell us and we will check the booking against the payment.
- You cancelled and the refund has not arrived — refunds take five to ten business days to reach a bank after we send them. If it has been longer, that is worth telling us.
- You never got the space you paid for — this is exactly what our cancellation and refund terms cover.
- You do not recognise the charge — the yard's own name may appear on your statement rather than ours, which catches people out.
Contact us at contact@bookayard.com with your booking number. If you have already opened a dispute, tell us anyway — we can still help, and the yard still has to answer it.
Who actually handles it
The yard, not us. When you pay by card, your money goes directly to the yard that supplies the parking — it never passes through Book A Yard. So the bank takes the disputed amount back out of the yard's account, and the yard is the party that answers the dispute and provides evidence to the bank.
What we do is give the yard the record of your booking: what was agreed and signed, what was charged, and anything the gate recorded. We hand over what we hold. We do not decide who is right — that is for you, the yard and your bank.
Our record is only as complete as what was recorded at the time. At a yard with no staff on site, that may be very little.
What happens to your booking
Opening a dispute does not cancel your booking and does not affect a stay you are in the middle of. If the stay is still running, the space stays yours.
While a dispute is open on a booking, the yard is not paid out for it. That is normal and it is not a penalty on anyone — the money simply stays where the bank can reach it.
False claims
Almost every dispute is somebody who genuinely believes they were charged wrongly, and that is how we will treat yours.
Very occasionally somebody disputes a payment for parking they know they used — or tells a bank something they know to be untrue to get money back, or threatens a dispute to pressure a yard into a discount. That is not a disagreement about a booking. It is dishonesty, and we may:
- ask you for your side of it first, and we will, before doing anything else;
- stop your account making new bookings, while leaving your history, your documents and your existing stays exactly as they are;
- pass the booking record to the yard, to your bank, or to law enforcement where there is a genuine suspicion of fraud.
To be clear about where that line is: losing a dispute does not make it a false claim. Being wrong about a charge is not a false claim. Disagreeing with a yard is not a false claim. What this covers is saying something you know is untrue. If you raised a dispute in good faith and the bank decided against you, nothing happens to your account.
If you are a yard owner
Your disputes are listed on your Payments & plan page, with the amount, what the cardholder claimed, the deadline, and the booking record behind it.
Three things are worth knowing:
- Only you can answer it. The payment went to your Stripe account, so Stripe only accepts evidence from you. We cannot respond on your behalf, and there is no button here that does.
- The deadline is hard. If nobody responds by it, the dispute is lost automatically, and the bank will not usually extend it. Some banks accept no response at all — where that is the case, your queue says so rather than showing you a date.
- Losing costs more than the booking. The disputed amount comes back out of your balance along with the bank's own dispute fee, whichever way it goes.
Respond through the link on that page, which takes you to the dispute in your own Stripe dashboard. The booking record on our side — the signed agreement, the payment, and anything the gate recorded — is listed beside it so you can use it in your answer.