HomeAway United Kingdom 

My parents have recently fallen foul of the 'guest rating' system in place on HomeAway. This is where owners score people who have paid to stay in their properties. They can say what they want without having to provide evidence or reasons and this then sits on the people's profiles and is shared with other owners every time those people enquire about other properties. My elderly parents received a horrible 'rating' (strange as we paid in full, in advance, obeyed the house rules and left the property if anything cleaner than we found it!) which is now stuck to their profile. They have no means of disputing the report against them. Even when we called and asked for it to be removed, we were told that it couldn't be without the owner's authorisation! My parents were really upset to receive an email out of the blue effectively slating them and to learn that this will now be shared with other complete strangers has caused them real distress. I'm pretty disgusted at the policy of HomeAway seem to hold fast to - just relinquish all responsibility for anything even when it's their model that's causing the upset and their website sharing the data! I won't ever book with them again and I would urge you all - don't use them!

We booked using this company and noted the "Book with Confidence Guarantee". The Villa ID on web site #10397191, a Luxury Golf Course, 4 Bedroom Villa with 2 Kingsize and 2 double beds, with an additional sofa bed in the basement. In fact the sofa bed in the basement with no A/C or natural light was the 4th bedroom. The Villa on arrival was dirty with hair and a toe nail clipping on the floor. All furnishings were very cheap and flat pack, this included all of the beds. Numerous faults and poor maintenance that are to many to go through. The key being the wooden staircase to gain access to the pool about 15 feet below the patio of the Villa. This was completely rotten and very dangerous,handrail had come away from the staircase and was loose, this level of decay would take years to achieve with no maintenance . All discussed with property manager, he said he was aware of them and was getting around to fixing them.
We left after 2 days having found another Villa through Panoramic Villas, who were excellent. We asked for a full refund. Three weeks later, no refund, no help from HomeAway and a credit card bill of nearly £11k for the two Villas. Do not book through this company.

I find the response from HomeAway, laughable, “we are an online platform...not party to any transaction...,”! You pay HomeAway directly who take 10% commission, who then pass the money, less commission to owners, how can a reputable company post a response that is factually incorrect. Read this response and make your own mind up what will happen if something goes wrong with your booking. My complaint is now being dealt with via Barclaycard.

Property #1095037

Hardworking people who choose to make sacrifices to save for their family holiday have lost a lot of money here, In our case over 4,600 Euros.
I first asked about cancellation for our August holiday due to Covid-19 in June and on 19th June received an email from the villa owner promising a 50% refund. Unfortunately she then started to back-track, and her emails became more random and difficult.
I asked Homeaway for assistance several times by email, web-chat and by phone. Each time they provided assurances but delivered nothing.
The most frustrating fact was that when I first contacted them for assistance they were still holding onto our payment above but despite me providing
clear evidence that the villa owner had effectively lied to us, went on to pay her our deposit in full.
This included a 200 Euro Cleaning fee and a 600 Euro breakage deposit.
Even though we never stayed there.
If you are considering booking through Homeaway please take on board these reviews beforehand as
they all appear genuine to me.
And if Homeaway don't survive this difficult time you may lose your deposit anyway, although I'm sure most similar agencies are struggling.
So do take care with your booking and with who you trust with your deposit.

We booked a long time in advance for in Sicily for a hen party and unfortunately Italy was under strict coronavirus lockdown at the time of our holiday. There was no contact from the owner despite my multiple attempts to speak to them. When I called HomeAway for help they assured me they would try and contact the owner and that we would either get a refund or would be able to rebook. I then got an email saying they took no responsibility for what the owner does. They say that the behaviour of their owners is important to them but I have been totally ignored by this person for months and have lost out on nearly 1000 euros with no effort at contact whatsoever. Without the money there is no way we can plan anything else so we are all very sad and feel very let down. I certainly won't ever use the site again and will encourage other travellers and owners to avoid.

FOTINI VILLA AGIOS NIKOLAOS WEST MANI GREECE
BOOKED AND PAID FOR 8th to 22nd August 2020
After travelling from the UK our party of 4 arrived at a Villa in Greece booked through HomeAway to begin our holiday. We found the Villa locked up, no one to greet us, the gardens were overgrown and unkempt and the pool was drained and dirty. Impossible to gain entry or stay at the property we immediately rang Homeaway but they were less than useless asking us to raise a complaint via email! - I made it clear that we were stranded and we needed to be offered comparable accommodation immediately for our 2 week stay in Greece. In all I made 20 calls to the Homeaway number in the uk from Greece Desperate for help and assistance, and they did not phone me back once, despite requesting to speak with a Supervisor/Manager or anyone with authority as a matter of urgency as we felt totally abandoned. They came up with nothing other than a Conference hotel 100km from our booking location, no pool with rooms overlooking a car park.
Ultimately we had no choice but to take matters into our own hands and book into a local Hotel.
I had to spend over 3k in addition to the original cost of the Villa and since returning home Homeaway have failed to apologise, have refused to refund my out of pocket expenditure, are hiding behind small print and have not even reimbursed the cost of the Villa which should never have been advertised. (We subsequently discovered this property has not been open at all this season due to COVID restrictions). HomeAway showed complete disregard for me being stranded due to their incompetence, allowing me to travel from the UK to Greece to a villa advertised and purchased on their website.
This Company is run by crooks STAY AWAY

We booked a 3 bedroom apartment with Homeaway and when we arrived it was a 1 bedroom apartment which was not ideal with a family. Homeaway are apologetic but are refusing to accept any liability. Absolute scum bags!

HomeAway are still refusing to refund us for a substandard property that we were unable to check into. Stay away from this disgusting company. Con artists.

(They say they are dealing with it below, but they are not. We’ve sent over 50 emails and called them dozens of times. They say the same thing every time but nothing happens)

I am the owner of the property management agency and Home Away did not send us money for more than a year. The amount is 1840 USD. It is not a big amount but I imagine if I had revenue as we have trough booking.com and Airbnb. In total, I had 91 emails with their CS so far.

Everything started out with technical difficulties and continued with purposely planned actions.

Firstly the customer support told me that it is their fault and that they will urge to sort it out. Their urgency is 6 months' time. Nothing happened. You will get an email every 4-7 days.

Secondly, they sent us half of the amount but on the general bank account, not our account, and the money had to be rooted back. That also took 3 months' time.

The third attempt of sending money happened again with half the amount and I am waiting for the response of their customer support if they are really so rude to make the process again.

In the meantime, our property management company gained 26 apartments and now in total, we do have 54. I am very happy that we survived the worst year ever. We did not earn anything but we gained market share. I am certain that we will grow in the future but for sure won't work with HomeAway, Vrbo and Expedia. This is the long term game and the time is not in their favor.

I would advise to avoid booking with HomeAway.co.uk They offer no protection for your booking, regularly hang up the phone when asking for advice and have not been able to provide any complaints procedure.

I have been trying to cancel our booking for Crete in 2 weeks time. The H/A website does not retain the details & history of our booking with the property owners, and there’s is no link to the booking we made. There is no functional query facility on the H/A website.

We are left hoping that the property owners see our speculative email trying to contact them to arrange a refund. The H/A Website is useless and their customer service non-existent. This is a learning event for us: we will never use this company again & we will share our experiences with our own many clients to help them avoid this shambles.

As an owner, I have been awaiting payment from HomeAway for several rentals dating back 6 weeks now. I have contacted them on multiple occasions and receive the same ‘systems error’ excuses and failure to follow up my request. I now have serious concerns about the financial viability of this company. My next course of action is to block further bookings and pursue legal recourse.

As an owner, homeaway is the worst. Their payments to us arrive late and, even worse, our most recent homeaway guests have still not had their deposit returned 2 weeks after they have left. There's not much we can to about that other than complain to Homeaway (deaf ears). The security deposits are held by Homeaway, not us, so there's nothing we can do directly to help. We won't be with Homeaway for much longer. It's safest to book elsewhere. Direct with the owner is by far the best.

We stayed in accommodation in Porthcawl, Wales which was awful. We had applied for house for 4 adults. One bedroom was adequate, the other, 2 single beds as described in advert but a small room with 2 beds, 2 wardrobes, a chest of draws & bedside cupboard lodged between the beds. The door was too big for door frame & didn’t have a handle on anyway to be able to close if there had been room! We had to squeeze out to get in & out, luckily my husband & I are agile pensioners so we managed. The sheets were grubby, my husband found a hair in both beds - yuck!
The house was very tired, grubby furnishing & decor, not at all clean. Wallpaper peeling off wall, dust everywhere. The kitchen was adequate with dishwasher but only 4 of everything so each meal we did washing up for next meal! Very very disappointing with NO recommendation from us for your company who put their name to the property!

We tried to book an apartment via Homeaway on September 2nd for the week commencing 19th. Homeaway processed the booking, but then immediately cancelled due to apartment already being booked. The property owner also emailed to say sorry but the property was unavailable. Friday 4th September Homeaway took the money from my credit card for the booking even though they had cancelled the previous Wednesday.Having spoken to them, they insist that the transaction could not be stopped. We have also had another email saying a refund will take 4 to 6 weeks. I would advise anyone considering using Homeaway to think carefully. If we were relying on that money for a holiday we would not be going anywhere.

Unfortunately I have to give this company a one star. We booked accommodation through this company to Cyprus. Due to Covid 19, British citizens were not allowed to enter Cyprus for when our booking was. Despite the fact that we could not legally enter the country to stay at the accommodation we had booked, we were still denied a refund. Not sure what they were expecting us to do...

We booked our holiday on home away in November last year long before covid19 started. Nearer the time we were due to travel we regularly messaged the owner of the apartment for up dates on the situation in mallorca due to covid. The owner of the apartment was great at first, answering all our questions, that is, until it started to look less likely we would be able to travel, then the messages stopped. We were reluctant to cancel through home away because we were out of our refund policy date with home away who wouldn't refund at this late date. We still had flights booked and paid for, we were flying with jet2 who were giving week to week advise on the flight that were operating. After being unable to contact the owner we contacted home away on the live chat with an adviser, more times than I can remember, as soon as I would get through to an adviser the adviser would suddenly leave the chat (again and again this happened). I finally managed to get a chat going and the adviser was sympathetic and said she would message the owner to see If she could get in touch on our behalf to either request a refund or transfer our booking to summer next year. I left the chat quite confident feeling i was finally making progress, but no one contacted me back so I tried again numerous times, I finally got a chat going again with the adviser, again full of promises again but didn't get anywhere, no one got back in touch. I have tried over 20 times to call home away to no avail. I have emailed and text and called the owner of the apartment asking if we could have a week next year as I wasn't particularly expecting a refund I am quite willing to defer my booking to next year, but he refused to answer texts and emails from myself. We would never book through this disaster of a company ever again or deal with the owner of the apartment that describes himself as a respectable business man
(more like a con merchant). The apartment cost £1,900, which is money we can little afored to loose, my estimation of him is that he is a robbing B. Stay away from this company.

We booked our holiday through H&A before the outbreak of coronavirus in January 2020. The lack of continuity in customer service and the appallingly poor staff was beyond reproach. Honestly I would never ever use this company again and have advised friends not to. If all is plain sailing With your booking then I’m sure people have indeed had good experiences, however if you need help at all you’re at a complete loss. I lost count of the number of calls I made trying to cancel and arrange a refund for my holiday, each time no one had ANY RECORD of my previous calls and gave a tonne of lip service. One minute I DID deserve a refund and the next I DIDNT qualify. Honesty my husband and I found the whole thing so stressful. We finally received a partial refund from a subsidiary company and have had to just walk away from it in order to keep our sanity. An awful, awful company.

Terrible experience with them and their book with confidence guarantee is a joke. When you get into the terms and conditions of the guarantee it’s actually all very vague with loopholes so beware. In our case the owner cancelled the booking the night before we were due to check in claiming a “double booking” on the homeaway app. We’d booked a couple of months prior and been trying to get in touch with the owner for a couple of weeks to confirm the details - the owner had ignored all our messages.

Due to the short notice cancellation we should have been covered by the “book with confidence guarantee”. Homeaway first tried to weasel out of it despite the cancellation was less than 24 hours before we were due to check in. After multiple phone calls they finally said they’d look for alternative accommodation on their listings - the only available one was too expensive for them to uphold the guarantee and said that they’d refund our money and we’d have to find our own accommodation. We luckily found another property on another site - it was twice the cost and after more phone calls to Homeaway they said that they MIGHT pay the difference if we sent them the booking details of the new property and associated proof of purchase. Four weeks later we are still waiting for a resolution - they keep giving us the run around by requesting the same information again and again. They only deal with the “book with confidence guarantee” claims by email so you can’t actually speak to someone. I will never use these guys again.

Worst Company to exist on the Planet Earth. Booked an accomodation, they cancelled it at the last minute and I'm behind them for the refund from more than 2 months. Now they say they cannot give me MY money back. Anyway I'm going to proceed legally, but u guys stay away from them. I will share this on all social media platforms so that noone else will get Cheated.

Doesn’t even deserve a 1 star, no manger ever available to speak to. Withholding my refund money!!! This has been a 7 week wait and still nothing. Now been passed on to a claims team who apparently only contact through email.
Avoid using this company, absolutely shocking will never use again or recommend to anyone.