Terms and Conditions

Machuca Homes operates an online platform where hosts publish homes in the Machuca Valley and the communities around it, and guests request stays in them.

The accommodation contract is between the guest and the host. Machuca Homes is not the owner, occupier or operator of any home listed on the platform, is not a party to the stay, and does not accommodate anyone. Hosts decide which homes to publish, at what price, with what rules, and which requests to accept. Guests decide which home to book. Each of you is responsible for your own decision.

What Machuca Homes does do, and is responsible for doing properly: it operates the platform, publishes listings and prices, collects payment from guests as agent for the host, administers security-deposit authorizations and the claims made against them, applies the cancellation policies in these Terms, and mediates disputes between users.

Machuca Homes is not an insurer of any kind — not of property, not of liability, not of health, travel or belongings — and nothing on the platform is insurance or a substitute for it.

These Terms also govern use of the website itself, whether or not you hold an account: by accessing or browsing the site you accept this section.

The content of the site — text, photographs, listings, graphics, logos and software — belongs to Machuca Homes or to the people who supplied it, and is protected by copyright and other laws. You may not copy, reproduce, scrape, harvest or extract content or data from the site, whether by hand or with automated tools, republish any part of it, or use it to build a competing product or dataset, without our prior written permission.

Ordinary personal browsing, and sharing links to the site, are always welcome.

You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into contracts. At least one adult must be present for the whole of any stay.

You must give accurate information about yourself and keep it current. One person, one account. You are responsible for everything done through your account and for keeping your credentials secure; tell us immediately if you believe someone else has access to it.

Identity. Machuca Homes may ask any user, at any time, for proof of identity or of the ownership of a listed property, and may suspend an account, hold a payout or refuse a booking until it is provided. Machuca Homes does not promise to verify anyone, and you should not assume that any user has been verified.

Guests and hosts communicate through Machuca Homes messaging. Phone numbers are shared both ways shortly before the stay, together with the arrival instructions — the exact timing is under “Arrival and departure instructions” — so that arrival can be arranged directly and either side can be reached during the stay.

Agreements about a booking belong in platform messaging, and stay there even after contact details are released. Dates, prices, changes, cancellations, conditions of the stay — if it matters, write it where both of you keep a record. This is not a formality: what the platform recorded is the evidence that decides a dispute, and a promise made in a private call is one nobody can verify, including the person it would have protected.

Contact details and off-platform payment attempts are blocked and logged. Free-text fields across the platform — messages, booking requests, profiles, listing text and reviews — are screened. Phone numbers, email addresses, web addresses and named messaging services are rejected when you submit them. Attempts to arrange payment or contact outside the platform are recorded for review. Repeating this is a ground for suspension, and Machuca Homes may cancel affected bookings and withhold amounts owed to a user who has done it.

Machuca Homes may read message content where it is necessary to operate the platform, investigate a report, decide a dispute or comply with the law.

You keep ownership of the text, photographs and videos you submit. You grant Machuca Homes a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, display, reproduce and adapt that content for the purpose of operating and promoting the platform and your listing or stay, including on Machuca Homes’ own channels. This licence lasts as long as the content is published and for a reasonable period afterwards in backups and records.

You promise that you hold the rights to what you submit, that it is accurate, and that publishing it breaches nobody else’s rights. Machuca Homes may refuse, edit or remove any content, and is never obliged to publish anything.

Where you submit content for a property you do not own, the licence you grant also covers that property’s listing for as long as it is published, whoever holds it. You keep ownership of what you made.

Listing videos

A host who wants a video tour submits it for review; they never publish or embed it themselves, and the listing shows a single “Watch the video tour” button either way. There are two ways a video can end up published, and both pass through the same review by a person.

Machuca Homes publishes it. The host sends a download link, Machuca Homes watches the file and publishes it on Machuca Homes’ own channel. Machuca Homes is then the publisher of record, which is why the rules below are stricter than “nothing unlawful”.

The owner already hosts it. Acceptable on one condition: the player must be the video and nothing else — no channel or uploader name, no suggested videos, no comments, no share controls, and no link that leaves the player. A host’s own video on a public video-sharing channel is never acceptable for this route, because that player carries their identity and a path away from the platform. The owner keeps paying for that hosting and keeps it reachable; if it stops working, Machuca Homes may hide or remove the video from the listing without notice, and it is not Machuca Homes’ to repair.

Four rules decide acceptance, and any one of them is a ground for rejection: no people on camera; no contact information of any kind, spoken or visible, including signage, addresses and social handles; no audio the host does not hold the rights to — background music is the usual failure, and Machuca Homes may mute or replace it instead of rejecting; and the video must show the listed property as it is now, and nothing else.

Review is always by a person, before publication, and Machuca Homes is never obliged to publish. A rejection is explained but is not appealable. Machuca Homes may remove a published video at any time, with or without reason. Submitting a video means confirming you hold the rights to it, and granting Machuca Homes permission to publish it on its own channels, to embed it, and to trim, re-encode, mute or otherwise adapt it for publication. A download link you submit is workflow state, is never public, and is deleted once the submission is resolved either way.

After a stay both sides may review each other. The window opens on the check-out date and runs 14 days.

Reviews are blind: neither side sees the other’s review until both have been submitted or the window has closed, whichever comes first. They are then read by a person before publication. A guest’s review is published on the home and counts toward the host’s rating. A host’s review is associated with the guest and does not affect the home’s rating.

Reviews must be your own honest account of a stay that actually happened. You may not offer, request or accept any benefit in exchange for a review, its removal or its content, and you may not use a review to publish contact details or to threaten the other party. Machuca Homes may decline to publish or may remove a review that breaks these rules, and may remove one that is unrelated to the stay. Machuca Homes does not remove a review merely because its subject disagrees with it.

Do not use the platform to break the law, to harass, defraud or discriminate against anyone, to misrepresent a property or a stay, to interfere with the platform’s operation, or to extract data from it by automated means. Do not attempt to bypass the payment, deposit or messaging systems.

Machuca Homes has two kinds of stay, and they are different products: a short stay is from 2 to 30 nights, and a long stay is from 1 to 12 months. A stay of around a month could fit either shape; which one you are booking is set by how the home is offered — short stays are priced and booked by the night, long stays by the month — and is always visible before you pay.

Booking is a request, not a purchase. When you submit it, your card is authorized, not charged: your bank places a hold for the amount of the booking. The host then has 72 hours to accept or decline. If they decline, or do not answer in time, the request ends, the hold is released, and you are charged nothing. Nothing is captured until a host accepts.

Until the host answers you may withdraw the request at any moment, for any reason, at no cost. That is a withdrawal, not a cancellation: no cancellation policy applies and nothing is owed to anyone.

A stay is confirmed when the host accepts. At that point contact details are exchanged and the dates are yours.

Payments are made by card and processed by Stripe. Machuca Homes collects them as the host’s agent, and paying Machuca Homes discharges what you owe the host for that stay: once a payment has been successfully collected, and has not since been reversed or charged back, you have discharged the corresponding payment obligation to the host, whatever happens afterwards between Machuca Homes and the host. All amounts are in US dollars, and any conversion your bank applies, or fee it charges for paying in a currency other than its own, is between you and your bank.

When you are charged. The authorization is captured as soon as the host accepts. Until then you are not charged at all, and while your request is still waiting you may withdraw it for nothing — so the free way out of a booking is the whole time it is pending, not a window after it is confirmed.

If a payment cannot be completed on a confirmed booking — the authorization died, the card failed — the booking stays confirmed and your dates stay held while Machuca Homes resolves it with you. You and the host are both told. If the payment ultimately cannot be collected, the booking is cancelled and the dates are released. There is no automatic retry or new payment link.

The price shown on a listing is the host’s price for the accommodation. It already includes the 1% Community Contribution, which Machuca Homes allocates to community-led projects in the Machuca Valley — it is not added on top of what you see.

Machuca Homes charges guests no service fee. The platform is paid by the host, out of the accommodation amount.

Amounts that are separate from the accommodation price, when they apply, are shown before you confirm: a cleaning fee on short stays, set by the host, and the security deposit, which is a hold and not a payment.

Prices do not include taxes unless the listing says otherwise, and do not include anything you arrange directly with the host during your stay.

Check-in is from 15:00 and check-out is by 11:00, unless the host agrees otherwise with you in writing through platform messaging.

Minimum nights. Every home has a minimum stay. It is the host’s own number when they have set one; otherwise the minimum that applies to the community the home is in; otherwise two nights. The minimum is shown on the listing, the calendar will not accept a shorter range, and search will not show you a home whose minimum exceeds the nights you asked for.

How many people may stay. A listing states two numbers: the bed places the home provides, and the maximum number of guests the host allows, which may be higher or lower than the bed places. You may not exceed the maximum number of guests, and you may not have anyone stay overnight who was not part of the booking.

If your group is larger than the bed places but within the maximum the host allows, the booking form tells you so and asks you to describe your sleeping arrangements to the host before you book. Accepting that booking means the host has agreed to your group as described; how your group sleeps is then your arrangement, provided nothing is damaged and no rule of the home is broken.

A long stay runs from 1 to 12 months and is paid monthly. Before you confirm, you are shown a Payment Schedule: the first payment, every scheduled monthly payment with its date, and the prorated final payment if the stay does not end on a month boundary. Confirming the booking authorizes those charges to the card you provide, and they are collected automatically on the dates shown.

Your card must remain valid for the whole stay. If a scheduled payment fails, you are notified and asked to fix it, and payment is retried.

If a payment stays unpaid, Machuca Homes contacts you and the booking is reviewed. Where it is not resolved, Machuca Homes may end the stay, may apply your security deposit against what you owe, and may continue to pursue the balance — including where you decline to pay or decline to leave. Ending a stay this way is not a cancellation you chose, and the refund schedule does not entitle you to anything: what you owe is what remains unpaid, less anything recovered.

A long stay has no in-place extension. Staying on means making a new reservation, subject to availability, to the host accepting it, and to the limit below.

12 months is the maximum. No guest may occupy the same home for more than 12 continuous months. This is a limit on occupancy, not on a booking: two or more accepted reservations that run back to back are treated as continuous occupancy, and short stays count as well as long ones. To book the same home beyond the limit there must be at least one clear day when you are not occupying it. Machuca Homes may also decline a request that would exceed the limit when counted together with the reservations you already hold on that home, including any still waiting for an answer.

Leaving before your check-out date. You may always end a long stay early. What you owe is 30 days’ notice, quoted from the monthly accommodation rate — or the equivalent of the notice you did not give. The effective check-out becomes 30 days after you give notice, or your booked check-out date if that comes sooner: nobody owes notice beyond the end of their own booking. Because a long stay is billed monthly, how much of the notice period you have already paid depends on which payments have been collected, so this is never settled automatically: Machuca Homes reconciles it and confirms the final figure with you before charging or refunding anything.

Cancelling directly means one thing: you have decided to cancel, and the schedule below applies. No reason is asked for and none is recorded.

If you believe a different outcome is owed, contact Support instead — ideally before cancelling. That covers a host asking you to cancel, something being wrong with the home or the booking, a disagreement about who caused the cancellation, or a request for an exception. Support does not execute a cancellation for you: it reads the booking’s record and decides how it should be treated, and it may classify a cancellation as the host’s even though you were the one who asked. Pressing “cancel” never automatically makes you the cause of the cancellation, and asking Support is not an appeal against a cancellation you have already confirmed.

What is refunded. The percentage below applies to the accommodation amount only. The cleaning fee and any other refundable amount are returned in full whenever the stay has not started, because they pay for services that were never delivered. A 5% Cancellation Processing Fee is then charged on the total amount actually being refunded to you — never on the booking total, and never in a way that turns a refund into a debt. Your security deposit hold is separate and is released in full on any cancellation before check-in. The 1% Community Contribution is refunded together with the accommodation whenever the accommodation is refunded.

Short stays

Long stays

The accommodation figure for a long stay is the first month.

The terms you were shown are the terms that are applied. What a cancellation costs is fixed at the moment you confirm it, not when you opened the screen. If the booking changes in between — the host accepts while you are reading, or a tier boundary passes — the confirmation is refused and the current figures are shown again for a fresh agreement.

Cancelling by mutual agreement. You and your host may of course agree between yourselves that a stay should not go ahead, but that agreement does not by itself change the outcome: it is requested through Support and Machuca Homes decides how it is treated. An agreement between a guest and a host does not by itself waive any platform commission, or any other amount that would otherwise be due under these Terms. Otherwise “we agreed to cancel” would simply become the way around the rules everyone else follows.

Every booking is covered by a security deposit. It is a hold on your card, not a payment. Your bank reserves the amount and it is not money you have spent.

How much. Machuca Homes sets the rails; your host chooses the figure. On a short stay the deposit is between $250 and $2,500: the host may set their home’s figure anywhere in that band, and where they have not, it is the accommodation value of your dates — excluding the cleaning fee — within the same band. On a long stay the host may set a figure between $500 and $5,000; where they have not, it is one published monthly accommodation price, capped at $5,000. The exact figure is always shown before you pay, and is fixed at the moment you place your booking; a change made afterwards cannot move it on an existing booking.

What is authorized is slightly more than the deposit. Your card is authorized for the deposit plus 5% — the Security Deposit Administration Fee, which applies only where Machuca Homes has to administer your deposit. It is not a charge and does not become one where the deposit is simply held and released: in that case the whole hold goes back to you. It is earned in exactly two situations, and in no other: where a claim is approved, and where an expiring hold has to be converted into a refundable payment while you are staying (described below). Where a claim is approved, the amount captured is the approved amount plus 5% of that amount, and everything else is released. The fee is charged at most once for a booking. The host can never receive more than the deposit itself, and never receives the 5%.

Before you arrive. The hold is placed about 8 days before check-in — far enough ahead that there is time to sort out a problem with your bank. Because card authorizations expire, a hold is replaced periodically during a stay — you may briefly see more than one hold from us during a changeover — and your payment method must stay valid for the whole stay.

If the deposit is not secured, there is no check-in. Arrival and departure instructions are not released and the stay cannot begin until the hold is in place, whatever the cause. This is a condition of every booking and a host cannot waive it.

The deadline, and what happens if it passes. If your card has not been authorized by 24 hours before check-in, and the reason is on your side — a declined card, insufficient funds, an authentication you did not complete, a payment method that cannot be used — your booking may be cancelled, and the cancellation policy above applies to it. That close to check-in, that policy will normally return nothing. We tell you the deadline before it arrives and you can change payment method at any point up to it.

If the problem is on Machuca Homes’ side. The deposit still has to be secured. A failure of our systems is not held against you and we will resolve it, if necessary by another way of placing the deposit, but you are expected to complete whatever that requires of you. If we offer you a way to complete it and you do not, the cancellation policy above applies as it would to any unsecured deposit. If every route has been tried and the stay still cannot go ahead, Machuca Homes decides the outcome.

If a hold cannot be renewed while you are already staying. Occasionally a renewal needs your bank to check with you and we cannot reach you in time. If that happens with the current hold about to expire, Machuca Homes may take the deposit as a payment instead of a hold, so that the home stays covered for the rest of your stay. The deposit amount is returned to you after your stay, at the point a hold would have been released. The Security Deposit Administration Fee is not returned with it: it is charged for administering your deposit in that form, and it is charged at most once for a booking, whatever gave rise to it. This is the last option after every attempt to renew the hold and to reach you, and it never happens before you have checked in.

Claims. A claim may be raised from check-in until 72 hours after check-out, and only by the hosting team. Machuca Homes decides it — the host does not. A host can raise a claim and withdraw it; they cannot approve one. A claim is valued at reasonable restoration of what was damaged, not improvement on it, and ordinary wear and tear is not claimable. Several items in one inspection are decided together. A partial approval is final and is not a negotiation, and there is currently no appeals process.

Release. If no claim is approved, the hold is released — normally 72 hours after check-out, and earlier if the hosting team closes its inspection sooner, after which no claim can be raised. Where a claim is open, the hold may be held while it is decided, but never beyond 7 days after check-out; past that point it is released whatever the state of the claim. How quickly the released amount stops appearing on your account is your bank’s timing, not ours — commonly a few business days.

If a claim is approved while you are still staying. The deposit protects the home for the whole stay, not for one incident. Where a claim is approved during a stay that is still running, the approved amount is captured and a new hold is placed for the full deposit again for the rest of your stay. The deposit is security, not a limit. It is the amount secured in advance so that a decided claim can actually be met — it is not a limit on what you owe, on what may be claimed, or on what Machuca Homes may charge or seek to authorize on the card you have on file for an amount decided against you under these Terms. A stay can therefore carry more than one claim, and what you end up paying can exceed the single figure shown when you booked.

A claim raised after the hold is released has no funded remedy through the platform.

What else the deposit can be applied to. Machuca Homes may also apply the deposit against amounts you owe under these Terms, including stay payments that remain unpaid. Anything left after that is released as above.

This is not insurance. The deposit covers up to its own amount, and only the things these Terms allow it to be applied to. It is not property, liability, medical, travel or contents insurance for anyone, and it does not limit what you owe for damage you caused.

The home you book is somebody’s property. Use it with care, leave it as you found it allowing for ordinary wear, and respect the rules the host publishes on the listing.

The host’s published rules are part of your booking. So are the arrival and departure instructions released before your stay, which may include practical conditions about access, keys, waste, water, animals, noise and the neighbourhood. Those conditions must be reasonable; if you think one is not, raise it with Machuca Homes and it will be decided under the dispute section. Receiving them is not itself a reason to cancel without charge.

Exceeding the maximum number of guests, hosting an event or party, subletting or re-selling your booking, smoking where it is not permitted, or bringing animals where they are not permitted are breaches of these Terms. Machuca Homes may end the stay without refund and a claim may be made against the deposit.

You are responsible for damage you or your group cause, beyond ordinary wear and tear, for its full value. The security deposit is security, not a cap on that responsibility — it is what is held in advance, not the most you can be asked to pay. Where an amount decided against you exceeds it, Machuca Homes may charge, or seek to authorize, the card you have on file for the balance, and the host may also pursue it directly. Nothing in the deposit system limits either.

Nights you choose not to use are not refunded. But a stay can fail for reasons that are nobody’s ordinary risk, and Machuca Homes reviews those individually. The categories are: force majeure, a home that is uninhabitable, a legal prohibition on the stay, fraud, and platform error.

None of these applies automatically. Report it to Support as soon as it happens, with whatever evidence you have — photographs and timestamps matter, and so does telling the host at the time — and Machuca Homes decides what is owed, which may be a full or partial refund, a credit, or nothing. Machuca Homes does not promise to find you another home, though it will try where it can.

How to find the home, how to get in, the wifi and anything else the host wants you to know are released 72 hours before your stay starts, in your account and by email, and they remain available for a day after it ends.

They are released only when the security deposit is in place. They are not public, they are yours for that booking, and they may not be shared.

Phone numbers travel with them. At the same moment, the host’s contact number is shared with you and yours with the host, so either side can reach the other during the stay. Keeping the phone number on your account correct and reachable is your own responsibility, guest and host alike: a problem that could not be dealt with because a number was wrong or unreachable falls on whoever provided that number.

Machuca Homes does not inspect, certify or guarantee any home, its safety, its legality, its amenities, or the accuracy of what a host has published about it, beyond the review described in Part C. It does not supervise stays, and it is not responsible for a host’s acts or omissions.

Machuca Homes provides no insurance to guests: not for injury, illness, death, theft, loss or damage to belongings, travel disruption, or liability you incur to anyone. If you want that protection, arrange it yourself.

You may list a home only if you own it or are authorised by its owner to let it, and only if letting it is lawful where it is, including any permit, registration, condominium rule or community agreement that applies. You are responsible for knowing that and for keeping it true.

That must remain true for as long as the listing is published. If your authorisation to let the property ends, your right to hold its listing ends with it: tell Machuca Homes, and expect the listing to be transferred to the owner or withdrawn.

Publishing a listing means accepting these Terms in the version shown to you at the time, and your acceptance is recorded with its date.

Everything you publish — description, photographs, amenities, rules, capacity, prices, minimum stay, availability — must be accurate and must describe the home as it actually is. Keep it current.

Machuca Homes reviews listings before they are published and may review them again at any time. It may edit obvious errors, ask you to correct something, refuse to publish, or remove a published listing — in particular where there is evidence that a guest’s health or safety is at risk from the condition of the property.

Your price must be a real price of at least $10 — per night for a short stay, per month for a long one. A home cannot be published, or kept published, below that, and a listing whose price cannot be quoted is not offered for booking until it is corrected.

You control your listing’s state: Listed (in search and bookable), Delisted (out of search, page still reachable and still bookable by direct link) or Disabled (no public page, no bookings). Delisting is about discovery; it does not block a booking. None of these states affects a booking that has already been accepted.

Who holds a listing

A property has one listing. It is held by the account that published it — the property’s owner, or someone authorised to let the property on the owner’s behalf — and that account answers for the listing: bookings are accepted in its name, it is responsible for the stay, and it is the account Machuca Homes pays. It may run the listing with a team, and what a member of that team does is treated as done by it.

Some things belong to the people rather than to the account. A guest writes one review and it counts twice over: towards the listing’s rating, and towards the personal rating of whoever was recorded as the primary host for that booking — fixed when the request was made and never changed afterwards. The two ratings are independent and neither transfers with the other. A listing that changes hands keeps its own reviews, and a person keeps theirs: someone new to a listing shows no personal reviews on a listing that already has many, and someone who has hosted elsewhere brings their own rating to a listing that has none.

Holding a listing is not ownership of the property, and it does not outlast the right to let it. Someone who can show they own the property may ask Machuca Homes to transfer its listing to them. Machuca Homes will require evidence of title, will tell the account that holds the listing and give it a reasonable opportunity to answer, and will then decide. A transfer carries the listing — its calendar, its accepted bookings and its published history — and bookings already accepted are honoured and are unaffected.

A written authorisation to publish does not defeat the owner’s claim. An authorisation is given by the owner, and a request from the owner to take the listing back is itself notice that it has ended. Where a manager says their arrangement entitled them to more, that is between them and the owner: Machuca Homes is not the forum for it, the listing follows the property, and any such claim remains a claim for money between those two. Machuca Homes may decline to move a listing where the evidence is unclear, and may withdraw a listing rather than transfer it.

You have 72 hours to accept or decline a request. If you do not answer, the request expires, the guest’s hold is released, and nothing is owed to you.

Accepting is a commitment. Once you accept, the guest’s payment is captured and the dates are theirs. Cancelling afterwards costs you money.

Long stays displace short stays, and you decide. When you accept a long-stay request whose dates overlap bookings on the same home, then before you confirm you are shown exactly what will happen and what it will cost you:

• pending short-stay requests are declined automatically, those guests are notified and their holds are released — this costs you nothing;
• confirmed short stays are cancelled, and each one is charged to you exactly as if you had cancelled it on its own. You are shown each charge, your estimated first long-stay payout, and any balance left over, which is deducted from your future payouts for that home. You must confirm this explicitly; it never happens silently;
• an accepted long stay, or the preparation period after one, blocks the request outright — it cannot be accepted at all.

Those short-stay guests are refunded under the host cancellation policy, in full where the stay had not started.

Your contact number is part of the stay. It is shared with the guest together with your arrival instructions — at the time described in Part B — and the guest’s is shared with you. Keeping the phone number on your account correct and reachable is part of hosting: a problem that could not be dealt with because your number was wrong or unreachable is yours.

Machuca Homes charges the host a commission on the accommodation amount: 12% on short stays and 9% on long stays. It is deducted from what is paid out to you. Guests pay no service fee.

The published price also includes the 1% Community Contribution, which is allocated to community projects and is likewise deducted from the accommodation amount rather than added to the guest’s total.

Cleaning fees on short stays are yours, set by you, and are passed through in full.

Host cancellations are never self-service. You file a request, Machuca Homes reviews it, and the booking changes only after that. You are shown the charge before you ask.

A host who cancels a confirmed booking is charged a percentage, and what the percentage is charged on depends on when the cancellation happens:

• Before check-in — the accommodation amount for the booking. On a long stay that is the first month, not the whole stay.
• During a short stay — the accommodation for the nights the guest no longer gets, not the nights already spent.
• During a long stay — the lesser of one monthly accommodation amount and the accommodation left in the stay. Cancelling a long stay never exposes you to the value of every month still to come.

Short stays

Long stays

The guest is refunded in full whenever the stay has not started, including the Community Contribution. Where the cancellation happens during the stay, the guest gets back the accommodation already paid for the nights they no longer receive, and nothing further is billed for that stay.

Repeated cancellations are a ground for removing a listing or an account.

Machuca Homes collects from guests as your agent. A guest who pays Machuca Homes has paid for their stay and owes you nothing further for it; Machuca Homes then owes you that amount, less what these Terms deduct, and pays it on the schedule below.

When a payout becomes due. On a short stay, your payout becomes eligible for release three days after check-out. On a long stay, each accommodation payout becomes eligible for release three days after the end of the period of the stay that payment covers, and the final prorated payout three days after check-out. You are paid as the stay is delivered, month by month — not when the guest’s money is collected, which on a long stay can be months before they arrive.

Where a claim, refund, chargeback or dispute that could affect the amount owed to you is open when a payout becomes eligible for release, Machuca Homes may hold or adjust the affected payout until the issue is resolved.

Machuca Homes may change the payout schedule for future bookings by updating these Terms.

When a guest cancels inside a non-refundable window, the amount that is not refunded belongs to you as a Cancellation Payout, less the ordinary commission and less the Community Contribution allocated from that amount — the contribution is made whether or not the stay happens. It is released on the schedule the booking’s normal payout would have followed — a cancellation neither accelerates nor delays your money. No Cancellation Payout is created for a cancellation after check-in, because the booking still earns its ordinary payout.

Amounts you owe and amounts owed to you are one net position. A payout may be applied against an outstanding charge. Machuca Homes may deduct outstanding charges from future payouts, and may suspend a listing while a balance is unrecovered.

Machuca Homes pays the account that holds the listing, to the payment details that account provides, and that account confirms it is entitled to receive money for that property. Any arrangement to share what is paid — with an owner, a manager or anyone else — is between those people: Machuca Homes is not a party to it and is not answerable for it. Where a listing is transferred, amounts already earned belong to the account that earned them.

Payouts are made in US dollars, to the payment details your account provides — ordinarily through Wise. The cost of moving the money is yours: transfer, intermediary and receiving-bank charges, and any currency conversion, come out of what is paid rather than being added to it. A transfer to a local bank account ordinarily costs more than one to a Wise account, and the difference is yours either way. Machuca Homes is not responsible for your bank’s fees or for its exchange rate.

You may invite other people to help you run a listing and give each of them any combination of four permissions: see the calendar, handle bookings, handle messages, and edit the listing. An invitation expires if it is not accepted within 14 days.

You remain responsible. Everything a member of your team does on a listing is treated as done by you: accepting and declining requests, messages sent to guests, changes to the listing, and any cancellation charge that results. Remove access when someone stops working with you.

Prices are yours and you set them. You are responsible for determining, collecting where applicable, declaring and paying every tax that arises from your property and your income, wherever it arises. Machuca Homes is responsible for the taxes on its own commission. Machuca Homes may ask you for tax information, and may withhold or report amounts where the law requires it.

The security deposit is not insurance and is not a substitute for it. What Machuca Homes secures in advance for one booking is that booking’s deposit, at most $5,000, and it pays out only for what the claim process covers. A guest remains responsible for the full value of what they damage, and Machuca Homes may pursue an amount above the deposit — but recovering it is never guaranteed, and you should not plan on it.

You are responsible for insuring your own property, including for events the deposit will never cover: fire, flood, earthquake, catastrophic loss, liability to a guest or a third party, and loss above the deposit — whether or not the event had anything to do with a stay booked through the platform. Machuca Homes does not insure your home, does not guarantee a guest’s conduct, and does not become liable for a loss because a deposit system exists.

Support is the route for anything that is not a straightforward cancellation: a disagreement about who caused one, a request for an exception, a problem with a home or a guest, or a claim about the other party’s conduct.

Evidence recorded by the platform decides it. Message threads, booking events and their timestamps, payment and refund records, changes to a booking, and the logged actions of both parties are what Machuca Homes weighs first. Material from outside the platform — screenshots, forwarded messages, audio, video — is supporting evidence only: it can add context, but on its own it cannot be verified as complete or unedited and will not decide the outcome.

Machuca Homes may reclassify who is responsible for a cancellation on the evidence and apply the corresponding policy, whichever party pressed the button.

Machuca Homes decides claims against a security deposit and decides disputes about the application of these Terms. It does not arbitrate between a guest and a host on matters outside them.

Machuca Homes may cancel a booking, and the circumstances include but are not limited to: a user has breached these Terms, there is evidence of fraud or of a risk to a person or a property, a listing turns out not to be lawfully lettable, the law or an authority requires it, or the booking cannot be delivered for reasons outside Machuca Homes’ control. Each case is judged on its own facts.

Two things do not depend on that judgement. Where the stay has not started, the guest is refunded in full. And Machuca Homes does not cancel a confirmed booking in order to give the home to a different guest — a confirmed booking is confirmed. Where the cause is attributable to a host, the host cancellation policy applies to that host.

Machuca Homes decides who may use the platform. It may refuse, restrict or end anyone’s access, at its discretion and in whole or in part, and may remove content or take a listing out of service at the same time.

The grounds include, and are not limited to: breach of these Terms, an attempt to take a transaction or a conversation off the platform, false information, an unpaid amount, conduct that puts a person or a property at risk, use of the platform or its content to build or operate a competing service, extraction of platform data, soliciting hosts or guests away from the platform, and anything the law requires.

A restriction does not by itself cancel a booking. What happens to bookings already accepted is decided one at a time: a stay may be left to run, attended by Machuca Homes, or cancelled where letting it continue would put a guest, a host or a property at risk. Where Machuca Homes cancels a stay that has not started, the guest is refunded in full. Payouts already earned and amounts already owed are settled in either direction. Where an account that holds listings loses access, Machuca Homes may withdraw those listings, or transfer them to the property’s owner or to anyone else authorised to let it.

You will be told that your access has been restricted and given a way to contact Machuca Homes, which is not obliged to explain how a breach was detected. An account ended for breaching these Terms is not eligible to return, and a new account opened by the same person is treated as an evasion rather than as a new user.

This section describes what Machuca Homes may do, not what it must do. Restrictions are exceptional and each one is a judgement about a particular account. Nothing here requires Machuca Homes to take any particular measure, to take the same measure it took in another case, or to act at all — and not acting on one occasion is not a waiver of the right to act on another.

You may ask Machuca Homes to close your account at any time. An account you have asked to close closes once nothing is outstanding on it — no stay in progress or ahead, no unpaid amount, no open deposit hold or claim — because you cannot walk away from a stay somebody has already paid for, and because money in either direction has to land somewhere.

Closing removes you from the platform; it does not erase the record. Your profile, listings and public presence go, and your name stops appearing on anything public. Reservations, payments, refunds, deposit decisions and cancellation charges are kept, because they are accounting and legal records and because the other party to every one of them has rights in it too. Reviews you wrote stay, without your identity attached: a review is an account of a stay, and deleting it would rewrite somebody else’s history.

Closing at your own request is not a penalty. You may open an account again later, with the same email address, and it starts empty — a closed account is not reactivated and its history does not follow you.

What Machuca Homes keeps, for how long, and what you can ask it to delete is in the Privacy Policy.

Neither Machuca Homes nor any user is liable for failing to perform because of an event beyond their reasonable control — including natural disaster, epidemic, war, civil unrest, strike, failure of utilities or telecommunications, or an act of government. Where such an event prevents a stay, the exceptions section governs what is refunded.

Machuca Homes provides the platform with reasonable skill and care, and is responsible for its own acts. It is not responsible for the acts or omissions of guests, hosts or their teams, for the condition, safety or legality of any home, for the accuracy of what users publish, or for anything agreed between users off the platform.

To the extent the law allows, Machuca Homes is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of enjoyment, or the cost of alternative accommodation, and its total liability for anything arising from a booking is limited to the total amount paid for that booking.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

You will indemnify Machuca Homes against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these Terms, from your misuse of the platform, from your stay or your listing, or from your breach of anyone else’s rights.

Machuca Homes may suspend or close an account — ending its access at once, including any active session — for a breach of these Terms, for fraud or a security risk, or where it is reasonably necessary to protect its users, the platform or its rights. Specific grounds named elsewhere in these Terms are examples, not the whole list.

The measure is against the person, not against other people’s homes. A listing does not leave the platform because someone who helped manage it lost access: Machuca Homes may remove a suspended person’s roles on other users’ listings — as co-host, manager or anything else — without affecting the listing, its owner or its bookings.

A suspended person may not use the platform through any other door. Not with another account, not with someone else’s credentials, not through any other mechanism — and no user may knowingly make that possible, sharing credentials included. A user who, after being warned, keeps enabling a suspended person’s access is in breach themselves.

What survives. Confirmed bookings stand and are handled under these Terms unless they can no longer materially be fulfilled. Amounts owed in either direction remain owed and stay one net position. Obligations that by their nature continue — over content, indemnity, disputes and money already moved — survive the end of an account.

Machuca Homes may allow individuals and businesses to promote listings through referral links. That programme has its own terms — the Affiliate Programme Terms — which you accept separately when you join it, and which govern commission eligibility and payment. Where they and these Terms disagree about a commission, the Affiliate Programme Terms govern.

Changes. Machuca Homes may change these Terms. The current version is always published here with its date. Changes do not alter the terms that applied to a booking already confirmed: what you agreed to when you booked is what governs that booking.

Privacy. How Machuca Homes collects and uses personal data, including cookies and analytics, is in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of your agreement with us.

Governing law. These Terms, and any stay booked under them, are governed by the laws of Costa Rica — where the homes are — and any dispute that cannot be resolved between us goes to the courts of Costa Rica. If the law of the country where you live gives you protections that cannot be taken away by agreement, you keep them.

The rest. If any provision is unenforceable, the remainder stands. Failing to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms; Machuca Homes may transfer its rights to a successor of its business. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any terms accepted separately, are the whole agreement between you and Machuca Homes about the platform.

Who we are. Machuca Homes is a trading name of a business operating from the United Kingdom, and it is the name that appears on your card statement. Write to us at hola@machucahomes.com about anything in this document. The Legal Notice says who publishes this site and what you may do with what is on it.