HomeAway

I am with the other reviewers I to was very happy with VRBO/Homeaway so I renewed 5 of my properties at the platinum and gold level to get the feature to find out that no longer comes with the subscription. Very unahappy about the service fee as well if more money is made in my property, I fell I should be the one getting the extra money. Then I looked up one of my properties as a guest would and saw a billboard advertising other properties who have paid Vrbo not me to advertise on my webpage that I paid $1295 for. Very unethical and yes I have noticed that inquiries have gone down. I listed mine on Airbnb and I gets as many inquiries on that site that is a pay per booking price. Very disappointed in VRBO/ Homeaway

Had a good experience the 1st time renting directly from the property owners so we decided to try it again. Unfortunately, the property owners we originally dealt with had sold their property so we started looking anew.

I spent a great deal of time narrowing down the property listings that were desirable to us and then sent off 4 emails to 4 different properties asking some basic questions.

It turns out that 3 of the 4 properties were managed by the same company and "Eric" immediately tried to pull the old bait and switch. The properties listed on the Home Away site all implied availability for the time we wanted, showing weekly rates.

Eric however wouldn't take our requests as he claimed they didn't rent weekly during the time requested even though the site specifically said they did. He also said that they wouldn't take a booking 3 months in advance. To top it off, he tried to rent us a property that was not where we were looking and twice the price!

After some unproductive 'to and fro' with Eric, I complained to Home Away about the false advertising on their site. Their response was to claim they would forward my concerns to Eric for resolution. What a cop out. Thanks for nothing.

Home Away is just another web site making money off transactions between people but providing no customer service to speak of and showing absolutely no interest in cleaning up their site by disciplining or getting rid of the unscrupulous lurking there.

You may get lucky with this site but ultimately I recommend that you avoid them since you will get no satisfaction if any issues arise.

Buyer Beware!

My mother and I both booked two separate apartments through HomeAway in London with the same owner.

We are due to arrive in a couple of weeks and we discovered that both of our listings have been removed from the site. We emailed, phoned (left voicemails as nobody ever answers) and sent text messages to the owner on multiple occasions asking if the properties were still going to be available for our stay, noting we were concerned they were no longer listed.

We have received ZERO correspondence from the owner a

Nd believe the listing we booked under were fraudulent.

So, we asked HomeAway / Stayz for help given they have a Booking Guarantee. It has been nothing short of disaster. My emails are consistently ignored, I have been told 5 times someone would attempt to contact the owner, however when I follow up I am told that nobody has called. Nobody will give me information about claiming under the guarantee despite me requesting it on multiple occasions.

I am now in a situation where my mother and I are out of pocket $700 each, yet will have to book alternative accommodation at a no doubt increased rate given the limited accommodation which is left.

I am absolutely appalled at the lack of customer service and care, let alone their refusal to give me information regarding their booking guarantee which they are not honouring!

I will never book through HomeAway or any of their associated websites again

I booked a year in advance and my rental was "cancelled" according to the property manager and she agreed to give me a full refund. Home away claimed that her account was frozen and my 1900 dollars I paid couldn't be refunded until her account was reactivated. I booked through homeaway- they should resolved the issue instead I spent countless hours on the phone with home away representatives, managers, and finance department and haven't gotten ANY money back even after property owner told them to refund my full amount. TERRIBLE SITE, DON'T EVER BOOK THROUGH THEM if you are really wanting to stay at the place you booked. NEVER AGAIN. Reported them to better business bureau.

I Placed a booking with homeaway and paid for the property in full through their secure payment system. (the money was taken from my account within seconds) The next day the owner of the property I had booked with sent me an email to cancel my booking because she wanted more money than she was advertising for the property. (she did not give me the option to pay the extra money just cancelled) I contacted Homeaway to get my money returned to me so I could place another booking elsewhere. I was told I should get my money within 5-7 working days, I explained to them that this is the modern age of banking and was not acceptable as I wanted to make another holiday booking now (money can be transferred immediately if you want to do it) out of principle I asked them for interest on the money they were keeping for 5-7 days, this was refused. As the payment was in Euros from a Sterling bank account I also asked for the amount to be returned to me was the exact amount that came out of my account, again this request was refused and they said the transfer would be in Euros and it was up to the exchange rate that day, again unacceptable. Homeaway are using this secure booking system to increase their revenue and cash flow by earning interest on other peoples money and its not about protecting their customers, this payment system also gives homeaway an opportunity to charge the holiday maker a booking fee as well, which I am pretty sure they never used to do. I will never use homeaway or this online booking system again.

Homeaway and VRBO are putting homeoners lives in serious danger by not doing their due diligence to vet the travelor adequately. There are too many chargebacks from criminals entering the homes fraudulently and sleeping under our roofs.
You are allowing criminals to enter our homes without any safety checks. At the very least you should varify payment credentials to know that the payee is who the say they are. Your site is insecure with a halfbraked processing company called Yapstone. They allow any transaction to occur and turn around and charge the host fees for their own blunder in processing. Totally unacceptable, and really really dangerous for the lives of the host's

There are no words to describe how evil this company is. I'm a homeowner, and I had my home on VRBO with great success... until Brian Sharples and HomeAway got their paws on it. I get NO inquiries, no bookings, very few views, etc., now. The reason is because I refused to obey (or as they refer to it, "submit to" - I'm not kidding) HomeAway and give it control of MY business. HomeAway (Also VRBO, btw) buries listings which do not submit to their arm twisting to get us to hand administrative control of our properties over to them. Basically, we owners now are there to do the cleaning and pay the property taxes for HomeAway. HomeAway has done nothing more than perpetrate a huge land grab from private homeowners, and if you don't submit to them, they bury your listing, which is why I get almost no business from what was once a great Web site which brought a lot of traffic. Did I mention that, for the pleasure of giving HomeAway control of MY business, it costs me and the traveler MORE?

Put this company and AirBnb out of business. They have destroyed the private home vacation rental industry. My subscription is up tomorrow; I am not renewing. You can't imagine how awful it is working with this company. It is dictatorial, authoritative, Fascist, and cruel.

My contract was with HomeAway. HomeAway Property Case ******* [ ref:_00D1aZzRr._5001P13hpQs: ref]
Supplier cancelled my booking after I paid and won't repay / has given me the runaround straight away and ever since. HomeAway are aware of the whole scenario from the start when initially the supplier cancelled (because they changed their mind) and then said they didn't receive my money. Then said they were going to provide a much reduced refund - cleaners fees etc, (but didn't). HomeAway / BookaBach have returned the booking fee only, and say they cannot help me further due to "data protection".
HomeAway offered no advice or help to assist me in recovering the rest of my money.
Supplier has now sold their rental property for over 1.4million nzd but won't reply / repay me!
https://www.bayleys.co.nz/*******
Its a strange world where data protection is used as an excuse for cheating someone out of their money. It should not be against the law to provide someone with enough information to take someone to court who has cheated them out of money. The primary thief - (Debra Taylor if that is her real name), *******@gmail.com has kept the money and I cannot take forward through the courts as I don't have her primary address / details.
The NZ authorities and UK authorities in NZ can't help either!

So as a homeowner who has used their site for the past 3 years, I came upon this service fee when I was sending someone a quote. To my surprise I saw a $59 service fee for a $550 rental. Obviously I called homeaway and had to wait 40min to talk to someone. I assume they were too busy fielding calls with other homeowners.

Now lets look at what they call a service fee which is supposed to help with 24/7 customer service and maintaining their website. A fee would be fine if it were a across the board fee such as $10, but when you charge 6 to 10% depending upon the rate with a max fee of $499 that is not a fee but a commission. Who in their right mind would agree to pay $499 to rent a house. This makes no sense. My auto renew kicked in February 5th, 10 days before the change so I will be arguing to have a refund and taken off the site.

Finally, assume each owner pays $350/year to use the site which many pay much more. With over 1 million houses that's at least 350 million in revenue. Somehow 350 million can not keep or maintain that site? This is nothing more than greed and I hope this comes back and bites them in the $#*!.

WORST SERVICE EVER!
Long story short - my $250 weekend turned instantly into $633.50 charge on my debit card (with no 'review charges before submitting' option). The owner said the dates were not available and it was an error on the site that it showed as available. Now I have $633.50 missing from my bank account that I must wait for DAYS to be returned to me. Hope they are having fun with my money these few days! Oh, and they told me they could give me a 'release code' to give to my bank to get the charges back right away, but my bank said it's not possible as they didn't put a "hold" on my card, they ACTUALLY CHARGED MY CARD. BEWARE! HORRIBLE COMPANY!

We rented an apartment in London in June for nine days. It had glowing reviews and the owner is a professional photographer! Pictures do lie, photographers lie too. Also HomeAway definitely does not assist renters. The apartment we rented had many problems. The owner lived in France and no one available to help renter. We checked out a day early as it was too difficult to leave from Victoria to Heathrow. Because we checked out early we were not allowed to review the property and we didn't get our one night deposit back either. HomeAway has a warranty but they don't tell you about that. You need to read very fine print The apartment had no hot water in the kitchen, nothing to hold on to when getting into two level 3/4 "bath", a 12" step up going into bathroom, dishwasher that did not work. We had to boil water in kitchen kettle to wash dishes, wall bed with metal frame ( which cut my leg) and was difficult to close so left it down. Bathroom sink I was told if I put the plug in it would not come out! Many difficult steps which were pretty hazardous and dark to get to apartment. Listing underestimated distance from Victoria and supermarket. Never again.

MY RESERVATION WAS CANCELLED BECAUSE THE HOMEOWNER DOUBLE BOOKED ON TWO SITES. LEAVING ME AND MY FRIENDS WITH NO HOUSE AND HAVING TO SHELL OUT ANOTHER $2000. Theirs reps were not helpful, and not one of them ever gave me all of the information I needed to know in one phone call. I had to call MUTLIPLE times to sort out a new place in less than 24 hours. I have been spoken down to, told that all I could be offered was an apology. I hope they go bankrupt, because they are absolutely morally corrupt.

We have been fighting insurance fund returns on trip and damage rentals for three units which did not work out thru no fault of our own!

HOMEAWAY is holding $800 in our credit card funds which they are blaming on the insurance they sell!
They are fingerpoint each other's Dept and have received no emails or phone calls from HOMEAWAY!

I'm sure CEO Brian Sharples loves the idea of taking money with immediate bookings and not return funds while they set in his bank account

My family just returned from a trip to Cape Coral, Florida. We rented from Yvonne Wilenius who owns several properties in the area. They offered a boat rental that came with the house for an extra fee. The property manager Chris had a very thick accent that made it very hard to communicate but we understood that we had to put a 800 dollar deposit down in the event that anything would happen and to be extra save he sold us tow insurance. The boat was JUNK it was almost impossible to steer but we made the best of it. The second day we got the boat stuck in the sand so we called for a tow! He tells us there is nothing he can do for us and we had to get it unstuck ourselves. My boyfriend, our three kids, and myself tried to get it unstuck ourselves with no luck and after 3 hours he finally showed up and had it towed. When we left the boat the motor turned over and there was no damage to the boat. Later that night our credit card was charged 1000 dollars and when we called him he stated that he did us a favor and that if he had not helped us we would've been charged 4-6000 dollars in towing expenses! We requested receipts and never received them and to top it off we they charged the credit card 2 more times once we left which we also didnt receive receipts! This trip was meant to be special for my father who is battling cancer but it was a nightmare! Dont be their next victim!

Crazy bad service. No 2 agents give you the same info to the renter or property owner. Property owner kept denying the reservation because they could not get things correct. In process I'm charged a rental fee for a property that I NEVER rented from them. In fact I have the property reserved through a rental company in the property area. They WILL NOT let you talk to a supervisor and they take you around and around in circles with NOTHING resolved.