Ron S.

Hi Homeowners,
We've all heard the complaints! Most homeowners have suffered huge losses in rental income thanks to these@&?%$ at VRBO/Homeaway. Having said this, my plan has been to leave these greedy crooks. Before leaving I built my own site with "go website", signed up for a free 2 month listing with "Vacation Home Rentals", and a totally free listing with "Home Escape"
With all these alternatives in place I still did not feel right about just pissing off the remaining 6 months of listing with VRBO, not to mention all the lost money in rentals they have caused me and everyone else. So I called VRBO and asked for a refund since they moved me way down in the listing since I did not opt for the "book it" feature and have changed the terms of agreement on 2/19/16, in the middle of my year long contract with them. You all know the answer "sorry we don't give refunds." Upset I left it at that until I read someone's posting here on this site to file a chargeback against VRBO through your credit card company used to pay for your listing. I myself used a Chase Visa card to pay for my listing and so spent a few minutes and called my credit card people, explained my position and requested a form to ask for the refund of my money.
I wrote how I was moved way down on the listing pages, how they changed the terms of agreement with no notice and to review this site as well as consumers affairs complaints on VRBO. Also mentioned that a class action lawsuit process has been started in Texas. All in all I invested about 20 minutes calling, filling out the form and faxing it in. I did this about 20 days ago.
I'm am excited to say that "I WON AND VRBO LOST!" I only really wanted a 50% refund, but went ahead and asked for the entire amount. I received back my FULL yearly subscription of $899.00 today! Take that you son of a guns! I encourage everyone that has felt screwed over by them to file a dispute of charges with their credit card company and to ask for your money back. Again I want to thank the person who suggested that people try this avenue of justice, posted on this forum, and I can gladly testify that it can and did work for me!
4/13/16
Ron S.

We have our listing with VRBO which is just another name in the same company as home away. We booked all our customers using credit cards and our own terminal for 10 years, as this is a better way to go rather than checks in the mail. When the book it feature came out we denied using this feature as we saw the potential of these service fees as a real threat in the future. THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED. We experienced a huge decline in our listing position as well as inquiries, but felt our property was nice enough to handle the drop in position. Anyhow so we thought we were ahead of the game until last night, using private browser we searched our property on VRBO to find out that we no longer came up!
Looking into it further we discovered when searching an area for vacation rentals the site AUTOMATICALLY makes a small check mark in the filters page to ONLY view book it now properties in that area to ensure customers only are driven to these listings so that Home Away/ VRBO get their new fee. This is UNBELIEVABLE and UNACCEPTABLE bad business. I will be calling customer complaint departments with the local news stations in my area as well as other agencies in handling complaints with businesses. I think everyone should join in as well as drop the book it feature as they CAN charge for this service if used, so just CHOOSE NOT to use it.