security deposit

[goofy3]

Thanks for answering my questions. I had another question. We have rented from other villas owners in the past. Their policy was we sent 2 checks, one for the payment for the villa and a seperate check for the security deposit. After our stay, they returned our uncashed security deposit check.
Again this time we sent 2 seperate checks, this time the villa owner cashed both checks right away and we are now waiting for him to send us security deposit.
How do other villa owners handle the security deposit and seperate checks?

[blott]

I don't know of many home owners who don't cash security deposit checks as there's always the possibility that if they need to charge it for some damage, etc it might bounce! This has been known on occasion so most take the precaution of cashing the check. So what your home owner does is perfectly normal practice.

Personally, I don't take a security deposit, just credit card info which is run for authorization purposes only, to ensure that it's a valid card, and no money is taken at that time. It's only in the case of damage or loss that we would charge it with the appropriate amount.

Each home owner has different methods which you should check out before you make your booking so that you're fully aware of what is going to happen, if it hasn't already been explained to you.

You can see from some of the replies above to your question about mailing a check has shown that some of the home owners didn't realise about the postage charge increasing. I'm betting that this has happened to your owner also. Cancelling the original check will have also cost your home owner money.

[dbrook]

We offer the choice of the credit card info (as Blott explains above) or a cheque for £200/$300.

If the guest chooses to pay by cheque/check then we do cash this and after inspection send a cheque back for the same amount. If we didn't cash it we would run the risk of a cheque bouncing if there was damage, and I have heard of this happening before unfortunately.

I would guess that the owner wasn't aware of the postal rate increase as that is easily done. I normally buy half a dozen stamps at a time and nearly did it myself. Sometimes the mail is returned to the owner if the postage isn't right. Happened to me once.