HomeAway

I cannot believe that not only do you hold our reservation money until our guests are actually in our properties, earning goodness knows in interest, you then feel it necessary to charge 2% processing fee. You are one greedy company. Maybe you should start considering the owners and not just the guests. After all without us you wouldn't have a business.

Come on somebody start a company that looks after the owners as well as the guests and keeps to their terms and conditions.

In April2017 we booked a rental in Punta Gorda. We had so many problems with the unit, the property owner offered a free week stay for the upper unit. Didn't think it would be possible for it to be worse, but it was much, much worse. Have left 2 voice messages & 1 text message and not one single reply. We had to book with a hotel for just our peace of mind. Not wanting to bring home unwanted bugs back home with us. So do not rent a unit at 1781 Jamaica Way, with Janet Paula with Century 21.

Reserved a place in Florida for March. Home Away failed to inform me that the property manager did not contact them to approve the rental so the reservation was cancelled. Yet, they charged my credit card three times even though the reservation was cancelled. Took 1 1/2 hours on the phone to try to straighten out the mess. I never received an email about the cancelled reservation and no one could tell me why. DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY.

I stayed at a property in Spain for a couple of months, and the place was quite run down and in a poor state of repair. I advised the owner I wouldn't be able to give a good review, and she understood, blaming the condition on previous tenants.
Homeaway is supposed to contact on departure to have you submit a review and this didn't happen. The other method is to log in, go on "my trips" and review it there, however there isn't a spot to initiate this action, so you can't leave a review. Contacted their centre, and did an on line chat, that ended with me waiting endlessly for person to get back to me, so gave up.

First of all, I never received a notice for the new service fees, at least one that was highlighted as a change of this importance should have been. Since the change, I have not made one booking as a landlord, both because of the service fee and the change in the program which requires a greater fee than the $200 that I was charging. I haven't found out yet if I get any money back when I withdraw my membership, or what happens to bookings in the future that I have already scheduled.

In the past, I was a member of VRBO. When Homeaway bought them, they got double the fee because I kept Homeaway. Now this, so I am taking my business elsewhere.

My cabin in Ruidoso was a successful, highly sought after cabin. My tenure since 2009, my 5-star rating from our guests and my willingness to pay $1500 per year to Homeaway for the platform made it work for everyone. Apparently that wasn't enough for Homeaway, they wanted to start charging the guests too. It was running beautifully until Expedia bought them out. Now it doesn't work for me or the guests, high fees, bad customer service from Homeaway, disgusting! I put in a search with all the filters to find my cabin and it was NO WHERE... did not exist! I've had less that 1/4 of the bookings of years past. Airbnb and TripAdvisor have picked up the slack but now I manage 3 booking sites to maintain my business. WORTHLESS... AVOID!

I am on terminal hold with your representative in my third call. You put a hold of over $5000 on my credit card and refuse to release the funds. I've asked three times to have the call escalated to a supervisor, the first time they sent me to main queue, the second time they disconnected the call, and now they've put me on hold for almost 15minutes without returning. If this is how you treat customers I will tell the world.

C. L. Morgan, MD

Update: the representative has since returned to the call and said that she "cannot" forward the call to a supervisor and placed me back on hold after I again requested a supervisor.

I have homes on both HomeAway and Airbnb. Nearly 90% of the inquiries that I've received from HomeAway/VBRO seem to be scams. They placed a scammer into one of my homes on a last-minute reservation who used someone else's credit card. It took me 4 days to get them out, they did thousands of dollars in damage and were running an illegal operation in my home. The police are still looking for them. HomeAway/VBRO and their insurance company, CSA, took no responsibility. Airbnb has much better screening for potential guests. If you're a homeowner who values your property, stay away from HomeAway/VBRO!

I have been with VRBO for years and then HomeAway took them over and not they are forcing me to use on line booking where they are charging renters a service fee of $350 and forcing them to pay a percentage of rental up front - I have a five star rating and have always stayed booked because o offer a great home for a great deal. Their fees are going to run me away - they also told me I could pay the 1500 a year fee so these renters would not be charged and when I agreed they slyly told me that I would not show up as much on their list... this is not right - time to move on!

They have completely changed all that was great, all in the name of greediness. If you don't sign up with Homeaway payments (which is awful for an owner) they drop you to the bottom of listings shown. We have been with them from the start, from over a decade ago and they could care less. Our home was steadily booked only a year ago and this year, we aren't even getting requests. We went from hundreds of requests to nothing for months. They want to make MEGA money by charging the tenants additional fees through their payment program, they weren't satisfied with the fees they were already charging the owners to list. Everything is so complicated now and this really is a shame. Beware!

Home Away seemed like a legitimate business and got us in contact with a renter for a property for a family trip from the US to Buenos Aires. We signed a contract with Home Away's help 2 months prior to our departure and took Home Away's "Rental Guarantee". When the renter backed out 1 week prior to the rent date and has bounced the check refunding the 2200. 00 dollar rent Home Away refused even to allow us to write a bad review about the property because we did not stay there!
We will continue to fight Home Away for reimbursemnet under their "guarantee" program but hold out little hope. Contacting them is difficult and when contacted they are rude and unhelpful.
This company protects the interests of property owners only.Do not rent from them. If things go south, they will not be there to help.
Hank West

I was scammed today on a "Malibu Dream Villa" on VRBO/Home Away https://www.vrbo.com/*******. The scammers had a fake site (with fake reviews) and asked me to wire transfer money to a Yakeenia Williams. Google her. There's only one. I didn't do it and I reported it to Home Away. They didn't seem to care that much.