I booked a Gite through South France…
I booked a Gite through South France Holiday Villas. TOP RATED villas, according to their website. We went for a week in August 2019. Not wishing to be unfair to them I sent them this review first for comments, to see what they, and the owner had to say.
They said they had never had anyone complain about the Gite before and the owner said, “ what did I expect for the price” ?
I expected it to look like the photographs that enticed me to go there in the first place...stupid me ! It was £600 plus for one week. South France Villas also said that they can’t be expected to visit all the villas regularly as they have too many.
They still advertise the villas as TOP RATED on their website though, when they may not have visited them for years.
So why am I being so mean ? Because the Gite website photographs didn’t bear a resemblance to what I actually got. I don’t think this is right.
I took lots of photographs as evidence but I unfortunately lost them by dropping my I phone in the pool.
However, I did ask South France Villas ( soon after I complained) to ask the owner to take photos of the Gite and send them to them, in order to show them that I wasn’t lying. Photos taken on your phone have dates on them and my request would not have given the owners much time to do anything about about the Gite. They haven’t sent them to me.
Despite what South France Villas say, my opinion still stands that the owners sent in photos years ago and then just neglected the Gite. And the organisation of South France villa Holidays just allow them to do it. It is just my word against mine....so you have to make up your own mind who to believe. I don’t want any money...it’s the principle.
So here is my review of the one bed Wisteria Gite Domaine near Bezier France.
Also TAKE NOTE any disputes ARE between you and the Gite/ villa owner, not between you and South France Villas. . They don’t check the Gites often, they say that they have too many, so photos on their websites could be years old.
This is what I wrote to them
Now I have checked that the deposit has been returned, (It was returned promptly) as we left the Gite clean. I will review the Wisteria Gite that we stayed at near Bezier.
Firstly the good bits...the pool was clean and the Aircon in the bedroom was a real necessity. The daughter of the house was beautiful. She told me that the WIFi was pants and she was so right.
But then the bad bits. The Gite was like a student let. Not what I expected from the photographs and comments on your website, or for the amount that I paid. The photographs on your website must be at least four years old as they are misleading and out of date.
The furniture in the Gite really made me laugh as it is all mismatched and smeared over with white paint to give the effect of liming. Liming furniture went out years ago in France and the UK. It was all very rickety and old fashioned ( there is antique and then there is ugly and old fashioned) with handles falling off, and only painted on one side. The pool furniture was without mattresses for comfort and certainly didn’t look like the photos on your website, as it was all grey.
There was no Toaster or Microwave in the kitchen and only TWO dinner plates and no mugs or large tea cups. We had to ask for tea cups. Then we got four smallish mugs. The TV wouldn’t work initially and it took a day to get it fixed but the control needed renewing and that never got done for the whole of our stay. The WiFi was a joke.
The toilet seat was loose, so you risked being thrown off it. We told the owner at the beginning of the week and she did nothing about it. It was a small thing but irritating. The toilet was also dirty as my husband tried to mend the seat. The plug in the basin of the shower room was also broken, so you risked small items of jewellery disappearing down the gaping hole. The sofa in the sitting area had a throw on it with holes in it.
The Garden was a utter mess and looked like a bare and neglected deposit for old cars and bits of iron. Dead flowers were in plant pots everywhere. I know it’s dry in France and water is expensive...so don’t have plants if you can’t afford to water them.
The Gite was dirty and I took lots of photographs of it, as although the shower room was newish, it was already being neglected. If you don’t clean stainless steel regularly it corrodes, especially if the fittings are cheap. The nice white crisp cotton white sheets featured in the web site pictures, didn’t exist. We had square cheap French pillows, one each. There were no Head boards.
The table outside was especially annoying as it was so flimsy and cheap it rocked. It had been painted and was cheap. The adjacent terrace outside was a real mess with a old sink in it visible and I could have knitted the cobwebs everywhere, into a jumper.
We could hear a washing machine through the wall of the bed room and the Gite is near a hugely busy main road. Relaxing by the pool you could hear the dulcet sounds of lorries and motorbikes clearly.
The owners really need to clean up their act and buy new furniture. Scrub the windows and frames meticulously and remove the dust collecting plastic flower arrangements that were every where and disgusting. They need to wash the curtains in the bedroom as they had a heading of a layer of dust and dead mosquito carcasses on the walls everywhere, do not make a desirable feature, either. Some chairs had the seats reupholstered but bits of the material hung down below. Everything was slapdash.
My advice, if you book through South France villas, is ask ‘ how old are the photographs of the place I have booked?’ The booking process was fine. Now it is up to you, reader who you believe. I don’t think the owners are bad people but they have the Gites and are also involved in another business, I suspect that they pay more attention to it.
August 20, 2019
Unprompted review
