Homeandaway Reviews 17

Love Home and Away, but so sick of Justin and Leah - off on, off on, off on. Recent reunion sickening to say to least. Give us a break from these two, please!

Booked 2 different apartments in two different locations. Due to covid I had to cancel but wait if I cancel via the app I lose 50%. Can you find a phone number for this company ummm no.
So I had to contact the owner and get them to cancel so I can get a refund. Never again will I use these.

Having been a loyal customer over many years advertising my properties through there website, the time has now come to call a halt
My properties are in Thailand, which has been closed to tourism for the last 4-5 months & I would guess closed for the remainder of this year
For HomeandAway to send in an auto renewal is a total lack of respect on their behalf
They should be crediting me for the months that Thailand has been closed to tourism. Do they really think I am going to pay another years subscription, when no tourists are allowed into the country
Seems they are happy taking money off of people, but when you complain or ask for a discount or credit, the line goes all quiet!
Disgusted with them & that is the last time I ever deal with them

Like most companies associated with the travel industry I can imagine that Home And Away have struggled during the COVID crisis. Some have acted well, been supportive and tried to help - I have had some very good experiences. Unfortunately Home And Away have been the opposite. No response, no support, no answer to mail, phone or chat. They now seem to have gone into liquidation and been bought in a fire sale by a larger US company, who show equal contempt for their customers. AVOID!

It's really incredible that it takes so long to get our money back.

The only thing we have received so far is an email with apologies, but besides, nothing happens......................

Do not use this company

I am a property owner and was well served by Owners Direct until it got taken over by Homeandaway. Now in addition to ther annual subscription to appear on the website thay take a 3% commission from the rental and pay the monies the day after the rental starts, so they have been holding on to the funds for months in some cases. Now, they say if you don't want to pay the annual subscription you can pay a 5% commission per booking, so that plus the 3% off the payment is a total of 8%. The only way to compensate is to increase the rental charge. Money grabbing so and sos. I shall be listing elsewhere from now on.

I booked a holiday for the half term break with my family, guaranteed by home and away as 'a book now and pay now' booking. Following my full payment I had no information from the manager of the property including the address!! With the flights booked and all our money with Home and Away for this accommodation we had no other option but to do as Home and Away insisted ......"Go. The address will defiantly get to you. The manager has until 12 midday on your arrival date to send it to you". AND no! We could not have our money back or alternative accommodation!
The family ended up stranded in Mijas, Malaga with no address to the property a had spent £3000.00 pounds on for one week! Home and Away's response to our dilemma? ...... We will start a process 'to see' if you can reclaim your money.

Simply: DO NOT TAKE THE RISK!

We booked a property on home and away. A traditional village house in Spain for 12 nights. The photos did not reflect the property. You cannot get in touch with home and away to complain. They work only for the property owner. They obviously do not check the properties. The owners can put on what they like. Our property advertised two bathrooms, one bathroom was in the basement it had a broken toilet seat, the toilet hadn’t been bleached for months, the tiling all needed regrouting, the hand held shower was nailed to a beam, the large mirror had not been cleaned. The other bathroom is non existent, it is a shed construction on the roof terrace with a toilet and shower in but nothing is connected. The fridge had a large black hair in it, the kettle was one you put on a cooker hob must have been twenty years old and was filthy, had to wipe the sticky handle and had no lid, the cooker was greasy, the oven door didn’t close, cups and glasses on the shelves had not been washed for months, even dust on the microwave knobs, toaster had to be cleaned, there was a toilet off the kitchen with a washbasin that could have fell off at any time. Lamp shades missing, the fans on the ceilings had months of dust on them. Dust on all the bed frames, bed linen was old and thin and did not match, mattresses were really old, towels had seen better days,there was a hot tub on the roof terrace but we wouldn’t use it as it had silver bits from the cover floating in it. We found bugs in the sofa.The property needs a good clean and items replaced. We left a list of all of this for the owner.
I have photographs of everything and videos of the bugs crawling.
A traveller wrote a similar review in french in 2018.
The owner cancelled our booking after we left. We think they done this so we wouldn’t receive a feedback form but we had already received it.This then indicates we would get a refund. We put an honest review of the property it was tame compared to what we could have put, we we did not list everything as I have above. The owner then replied and said it was all lies and fabricated she was personal and called us “two elderly ladies”. YOU CANNOT DEFEND YOURSELF OR UPLOAD PHOTOS. We are two well travelled ladies in our fifties by no means elderly. We e mailed the owner asking for our refund. We have had no replies. We will never get a refund as home and away do not help the traveller.
You cannot reach home and away by any means, so the owners can get away with anything.

Never again will we use Home and Away.

Absolutely fautless experience with our Honeymoon booking in Crete, 2019.

Payments staggered as they should be - transaction was smooth and the whole experience was superb. Even allowed us a late check out for no extra charge when we asked the question.

On the whole an excellent experience.

What a stressful, horrific experience we had when we, as a family with two young children, arrived in Brighton, 300 miles on a train from Manchester with luggage, only to find no one to hand over the keys to my booked apartment.
When, after 2/3 hours of my frantic phone calls to a "help centre", we where offered another house. This turned out to be another nightmare as no one was there to accommodate us for the weekend.
We just walked along the coast road until someone found us a room for the night.

Only interested in ripping off holiday makers. Much is made of their "Book with Confidence Guarantee" but they offer nothing extra for what they charge. Phones ring and ring and then ring out and EMails take days to be responded to. Not much help when you have been let down and are stranded with no decent accommodation in a foreign country.

Payments made by Credit Card or through PayPal are automatically protected against "loss" by either the Card Issuer or Paypal (not Debit Cards). YOU DO NOT NEED TO PAY EXTRA for this protection.

Advertisers pay an annual fee to be featured on this site, but H&A like to paint their advertisers in a "grey" light as being unscrupulous and groom holiday makers into paying extra for their so called guarantee. In my experience this is usually between 10 & 12% on top of the prices set by the property owners. In high season this amounts to a considerable amount of money - for what?

They only have contact details for the property owners and do not have any details of agents "on the ground" to assist in the event of problems.
If they were really interested in the well being of the Holiday Maker they should channel some of these funds into providing a robust verification system on advertisers and show a reliable "trustworthy" scoring.

When booking through this site, check with the Owners if they offer a secure method of payment i.e. through Paypal - if they do you could save literally hundreds of pounds. I would never endorse anybody transferring funds direct to an Owners Account unless you know them and/or have stayed with them before and know they are reputable - but payment handlers like PayPal and Credit Card Issuers usually only charge a maximum of 4% of the transaction value which puts the H&A surcharge in perspective.

The latest twist is that H&A are now insisting that all payments for bookings must be made through their payment portal where they can cream off their massive surcharge. By shrouding it in the terms of payment for a Guarantee they presumably believe they get round the latest EU regulations for applying a surcharge against On Line Payments.

To add insult to injury, if you raise this with H&A (if you can ever get through) they maintain this is what Holiday Makers want !!!!!!

Originally OwnersDirect used to be a perfect site for booking your holiday property through. Home and Away have recently rebranded this to be H&A - search for OwnersDirect.co.uk on Trustpilot and you will find that there are some 1800+ reviews giving a very sorry story of this Company.

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Homeandaway is deserving of no stars! The place that we had rented was not at all as represented on the website. It had noticeably dirty walls and carpet, cobwebs around the ceiling, and dirty cooker and fridge.

The day after entering the flat, I rang HomeAway and lodged a formal complaint about the lack of cleanliness everywhere and provided photos as evidence. We vacated the flat that next morning despite having already paid for 2 additional nights. (We stayed at a very simple yet clean hotel in Amsterdam instead.) We have been waiting nearly 2 months (since 7 August when we made a formal complaint) with no real response from Homeandaway. It appears that despite 5 phone calls over this period of time, Homeandaway is making no attempt to reimburse us for our very poor experience. The only response after 5 phone calls to Homeandaway has been that they have removed the property from their website! I do not recommend using Homeandaway ever.

We booked a villa in Monte Pego, Spain through Homeandaway website. The villa turned out to be well below standard, dirty, electrics and water failed repeatedly totally ruined holiday. Homeandaway were contacted immediately on our return, we could not, and still cannot ascertain who the villa owners are to pursue a refund. Homeandaway have persistently refused to lift a finger or even furnish us with basic contact details for the owner(s). Homeandaway have also deleted a bad review posted by another member of our party on this website. * DO NOT USE THIS WEBSITE OR ANY ASSOCIATED COMPANY UNDER EXPEDIA GROUP *

Booked a 2019 Sat to Sat holiday through this site requested dates told us was available, booked paid deposit was then told change over was Friday to Friday.So we comprised. A week later had email saying holiday was cancelled. First said owners needed property then double booked.
Dont bother if you want to be let down. Doesnt tell you change over days, and the holiday is still available to book. Real pain have to request to book, wait.Then pay deposit then wait for owner to confirm, then pay deposit again as first time just holds payment. Then they cancel.

WE HAVE HAD FIVE SEPARATE GUESTS STAY AND STILL WE HAVE NOT RECEIVED A PENNY FROM THIS COMPANY.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK TO ANYONE. EMAILS ARE IGNORED.

AVOID THIS COMPANY. DONT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE AS US.

OMG...Owners Direct has sold to HomeandAway. My experience as a partner, e,g I let holiday properties. It is chaos there, all the addresses have changed on my property and you cannot find anything easily. They cannot and will not look at what the customer experience is. They want to charge more money for a worse service. Phone calls are not being responded to. Not good for business. I just want my property shown and for it to be accurate. I dont see why I have to pay more because they want to suddenly change, with no demonstration of business remaining the same or increasing. I can’t get to management to explain.