Frequently Asked Questions

You choose your dates and send a request to the host, who has 72 hours to answer. This is not instant booking: a home is only yours once its host has said yes.

Your card is authorized when you send the request, and charged only if the host accepts. If they accept, your stay is confirmed and the payment goes through. If they decline, or if the 72 hours pass without an answer, the request ends and the hold comes off your card.

When the host accepts, and not before. Sending a request places a hold on your card: your bank sets the amount aside, but it never leaves your account and no payment is taken.

If the request is declined or expires, the hold is released automatically. You do not have to ask for it back.

Yes. While a request is still waiting for an answer you can withdraw it from your account, at any time and for any reason. Nothing has been charged, so there is nothing to refund and no cancellation policy involved — the hold is simply released.

Yes. How much comes back depends on how far ahead of check-in you cancel, and it works differently for short and long stays.

You will never have to work it out yourself: before you confirm a cancellation, the exact amount being refunded to you is shown on screen. The full schedule is in our Terms & Conditions.

Yes. We charge guests no service fee, and the 1% Community Contribution is already inside the published price rather than added at the end. Search results show the full amount for your dates, and the booking form breaks that amount down line by line before you commit to anything.

The only separate figure is the security deposit, which is a hold rather than a payment — see how the security deposit works.

Yes, and we would rather you did. Every listing has its own conversation: ask about the road in, the water, the wifi, whether your dog is welcome, anything. Knowing who is handing you the keys is most of what this site is for.

Conversations stay on Machuca Homes, so we block contact details and links in messages.

It is not there to keep you apart. It is what lets us stand behind a booking at all: if a stay goes wrong, if a deposit is disputed, or if someone is not who they said they were, the record of what was agreed is here and we can act on it. A conversation that moved to WhatsApp is one we cannot help with.

72 hours before check-in, in your account and by email: how to find the place, how to get in, the wifi, and anything else the host wants you to know before you arrive.

It is a hold on your card, not a payment. Your bank sets the amount aside and it stays there. Money is only taken from it if something is owed — damage, or a payment left unpaid — and that is decided by us, never by the host alone.

Your host sets it for their home, inside limits Machuca Homes fixes: between $250 and $2,500 on a short stay, and between $500 and $5,000 on a long stay. Where a host has not set a figure, we derive a default from the booking itself — on a short stay the accommodation total for your dates, on a long stay one month of accommodation — never above the same limits. The amount is shown before you confirm.

The hold is placed shortly before you arrive rather than at booking, and released a few days after you check out.

A host has a short window after check-out to raise it, with evidence and costs. They cannot take money from your deposit themselves — Machuca Homes reviews the claim and decides, and a host can never approve their own.

If a claim is approved, what is taken is the approved amount plus the Security Deposit Administration Fee of 5% of that amount, and the rest of the hold is released. The host receives the approved amount and never the fee, which covers reviewing the claim and processing the payment. If the claim is not approved, the whole hold is released and nothing is charged. Either way you hear from us, not only from the host. The detail is in our Terms & Conditions.

Month by month, in advance. The first month is held when you request the stay and charged when the host accepts; each following month is charged on the same date. If your stay ends part-way through a month, that last part is charged for the days you are actually there, not the whole month.

Yes, if the dates are still free and your host accepts — make the new booking here on Machuca Homes so your stay, your payments and your protections carry over with it.

One limit to know about: 12 months is the most you can stay in one home at a stretch, counting every booking you have there back to back. Staying on beyond that means leaving a clear day between one booking and the next. Our Terms & Conditions sets it out in full.

Listing is free, and stays free. We earn only when you do: 12% of a short-stay booking and 9% of a long-stay one, charged on the accommodation only — never on the cleaning fee, which is passed to you in full. Card processing is included in that — there is no second fee underneath it.

The price you publish is the price the guest pays, with the 1% Community Contribution already inside it. Your payout is that price less our fee and the contribution — the listing form shows you the estimate for real booking lengths as you set your price, so you are never guessing.

Your payout is confirmed three days after your guest checks out — on a long stay, three days after the end of each month of their stay, and the last one three days after check-out.

A payout waits only if a refund or a claim is still open on that booking.

Yes. Every request comes to you with the guest, the dates and the party, and you have 72 hours to accept or decline. Nobody arrives at your home without you having said yes.

If the 72 hours pass without an answer the request expires on its own and the guest is not charged. Declining costs you nothing.

Yes. This is not an exclusive arrangement, and it is not meant to be. Sync your calendar with the other sites you use and the dates stay in step in both directions, so a booking taken elsewhere closes those dates here too.

After we have read it. Every new listing is reviewed before it is published — we are a small valley and the catalogue is the reputation of all of us — and you get an email the moment yours is approved and visible. How to create a listing walks through the steps.

Two ways, from My Listings, and the difference matters.

Delist takes your home out of search but leaves its page live and bookable, so you can still send the link to a returning guest and the page keeps the position it has earned on Google. Disable takes the page down entirely and stops bookings. Either can be undone whenever you like.

Yes. Invite them to your listing team and choose exactly what they can do: see the calendar, handle bookings, reply to guests, edit the listing — each one granted separately. You stay the owner, and you can change or withdraw their access at any time.

You can, and sometimes life makes you. But an accepted booking is a promise a guest has made plans around, so cancelling one carries a charge, while declining a request costs nothing at all — which is why it is worth answering requests you are unsure about rather than letting them sit.

What the charge is depends on how close to check-in you cancel; it is set out in our Terms & Conditions.

Good photographs are most of whether a listing gets booked, and they are worth doing properly once. We keep a page of professional photographers who work in the valley and know these houses. We take nothing from it — you deal with them directly.

1% of every booking, already included in the published price, goes to projects chosen for the good of the Machuca Valley — the community funds, and the wider communities the valley depends on.

Machuca Homes contributes too: we commit 5% of our net monthly income to the same purpose. This valley is being built on quickly, and some of what that brings is not good for it. This is the part we can do something about.

After check-out, guest and host each have 14 days to write about the other.

Neither review appears until both have been written, or until the 14 days run out. Nobody gets to read what was said about them and then answer it, which is what makes the reviews on this site worth reading.

Ask us — contact Machuca Homes. A person reads it.