VRBOReviews 1,999

All you owners on vrbo, too! Info is on this page: https://gethuman.com/contact/HomeAway-com
We are all losing business!

In the media! http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/travel/sc-vrbo-new-fee-travel-*******0323-story.html

Go to facebook, owners, and join our group! We have over 1000 members, and growing. Look under vrbo fees, and there are a couple or so groups. Ours is the bigger one. You can join the group, if you are on vrbo. We are also asking for a boycott of Expedia, and their other companies, Hotels.com, orbitz, travelocity, and others. Check facebook for the details. They are destroying our website! Expedia bought out vrbo and homeaway.

I recently wrote a negative review about VRBO, a company that handles/handled two of our rental properties.

I accidentally either missed the button on the one star rating or hit the wrong one. Luckily, Paul H. Who also wrote a review, caught my error and asked me why I wrote a bad one yet gave them five stars. I rate them one star. You can't get much lower than that.

Our clients have consistently been shocked by this new turn of events.

VRBO, time to hear the voice of your customers.

I have been a property owner and thus VRBO customer for over 3 years! I WAS very satisfied until this February. VRBO without notice to homeowners started charging "a service fee" to the renter. This is a bogus fee... It is NOT a help line, customer service as they claim! I have never received a review lower than a 4. All except one have been 5's for my Solana Beach, CA. Property. I personally meet guests, give them the keys and show them around and answer all questions. I am only a phone or email away if they encounter any problems while in my condo. I also pay $1500 per year in annual subscription fee to VRBO so my tenants don't have to. I am telling potential tenants this fee is wrong and to book directly through me. The fee is 4 to 14% and they are DEFINATELY double dipping. I am currently looking elsewhere to advertise my property. They recently merged with tripadvisor/expedia instead of better service and more bookings and exposure, that they led us owners to believe, it has been very disappointing and I believe the "new" people running the show are responsible!

The new management of VRBO has ruined the business model. I have been a member for just over a year but I noticed an immediate drop in inquiries as soon as the new "service fee" (of which I had no advance warning)went into effect.

April 2016 is the first full month that I have had to compare with last year. It is April 26 and I have 176 inquiries. Last year I had over 1100 inquiries.

Last year I had no history with feedbacks or on line booking so my ad was not placed as favorably as it is this year. I have checked and find the position of my listing is very satisfactory this year.

In spite of my favorable listing position, the inquiries have dropped off dramatically. This clearly means that many people are no longer shopping on VRBO.

Can you believe it? In the midst of all of this, VRBO had the gaul to automatically switch my 2 accounts to Book it Now and Online Payments. Without my permission! I had to go in and manually turn both services off, which sends my algorithm ratings down to the end of the pages, I suppose. I was shocked. How much worse can they be? It is like they are purposefully trying to alienate everybody. I will be switching to another service but don't know which one to go to yet.

I'm thoroughly annoyed to learn of VRBO's new service fee to renters. I didn't find out about this till today - and had been wondering why I hadn't gotten the inquires I usually do by this time of year for my Cape Cod rental.

As a property owner, I never liked the VRBO website. It's glitchy, it isn't intuitive (on the owner side, through the "owner dashboard"), and it's been the cause of a lot of confusion for my renters (repeat/multiple emails being automatically sent requesting payment through the website, for example, when my renters and I had agreed to alternative methods of payment). I only paid to have the VRBO account because of the traffic the website got.

Assessing the renter an additional fee on top of the rate we set I find exploitative and misleading. From the renter's perspective, it feels like they're being taken advantage of, and that's not a nice foot to start off on.

As others have said, VRBO is double-dipping - they already charge the owners a fee (annual subscription); there is no need to assess renters a 4-9% fee as well. A small, flat booking fee I MAYBE could understand. There's been no explanation of why the fee is on a scale and where they came up with the range. It feels arbitrary and, again, exploitative.

I will be canceling our subscription.

UPDATE: VRBO's CEO in a letter said that the new fee hasn't affected homeowners. Please view this photo that shows a total dropoff in page views that led to inquiry after the fees were implemented in February - a complete inverse of prior-year activity patterns (prior year in light blue, current year in dark blue).

They also identify / punish owners who don't accept every inquiry... Unfair as I'm limited by number of guests on permit with county. I always have groups over the limit & have to tell them no or lose my permit. VRBO I out of touch with market & their "research" on service fees is bogus.
Airbnb charges 2.5-2.9% with no subscription fee. Not sure how VRBO justifies 4-10%. Plus 1000. 00 for platinum subscription.
Can't wait for legal action!

Since being taken over by Expedia, VRBO has become a much more negative experience for both owners and guests. After charging up to 10% per rental in addition to yearly fees when they took over, Expedia has ruined what was a good company by degrading both the customer service and the security of booking online. As a property owner, I now constantly have to guard against online scammers who access my VRBO inbox and try to get guests to divert funds to them. Despite changing my security settings several times, this is an ongoing problem. VRBO offers no solution other than to change the settings. Owner and guests need to beware.

I honestly find it to be a breach of contract (besides unethical) the fact that VRBO has suddenly and unilaterally decided to charge a booking fee to guests... which now will deter "food traffic" to the site, a site we have paid for.

I should have known it was time to change when I had money taken from my account after someone decided to call their card charge as fraud (which it wasn't) and VRBO did nothing (read NOTHING) to try help out on the matter. I had to call back and forth to banks, credit cards and, ultimately, the guest itself to try figure out what was going on.

I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt as a "one of"... Needless to say, with this sudden fee "hospitality gesture", VRBO is definitely loosing my business.

VRBO bills both the homeowner and the guest (of course the guest ultimately pays both fees). VRBO went from a cost effective way for a vacation property owner to "put their shingle out" to a corporate ripoff that makes a decent vacation unaffordable for your average person.

Don't support their shady business practices by listing your property with them. There is going to be a mass exodus in 2016 to more cost effective sites. You don't want to be the one closing the door on your way out.

We have a small studio beach condo and have been with VRBO the last three years. We pay $350 per year for their platform to advertise and until now have been fairly happy with the service overall. Without notice, they have implemented a 4-10% service fee - amounting to an extra $160 per month of rental... our inquiries have plummeted. We have already lost 4 months worth of bookings to this fee. Our calendar is near empty for the next 3 months in WAIKIKI HAWAII! Our rates are no longer competitive. Are you serious VRBO? Adding an extra $2000 in fees per year to our clients? We will be leaving VRBO as soon as our subscription expires. Good riddence. Can't wait to join some type of class action lawsuit.

VRBO/Homeaway has lost it's way. It has merged with so many competitors that it now has a near monopolistic position and it is taking advantage of homeowners and guests.

I have 7 properties listed in a competitive market. I am paying over $1200 on most listings because I need to be at the upper subscription levels because there are nearly 1500 rental listings in my market. Subscription prices continue to rise without any corresponding level of service or booking effectiveness

All the properties are continually upgraded, have high ratings and we respond within an hour to inquiries. Despite this booking levels have dropped.

Training of staff must be nonexistent because nearly every time I interact with VRBO/Homeaway I receive incorrect information. Wait time to speak with someone can be an hour.

As other users have noted, other websites allow 360 reviews, both owners and guests can review each other. Fortunately we screen our guests well and probably have been lucky so we've only had a couple of instances with difficult guests and one threatened to write a bad review if we didn't give them money. I wouldn't succumb to blackmail and had to write a response but the bad review held and I had to apologize to neighbors for their unruly behavior.

They have taken a transparent operating platform where users could understand where their property would be listed and what costs would be. Now the new algorithm means you have no idea where your property will appear in listings. You also can't get a straight answer on the new service fee.

Now they claim they need to charge a service fee to guests to cover their costs. No they don't. I've worked in finance so I understand their business. It is clear that they have gotten greedy. In my market you can have someone manage and lease your property for a fee of 20%. With the new service fee on top of the high subscription costs and the low level of performance my equivalent percentage costs is 18%. My time is more valuable than 2%. I'm letting my subscription lapse tomorrow.

Congratulations VRBO/Homeaway, you've pushed and pushed on the fees and I have had enough.

Like so many of the other reviews here... VRBO has deteriorated to a vestige of its former self. In addition to all that has been reported, I have discovered that there have hidden my listing, and one reviewer reports. I have refused to do online booking and home away payments. My 5 star business and super hosting practices, not withstanding, my inquiries have dropped to nothing, when I started complaining. I have now repeatedly been unable to pull up my listing on mine and others mobile and iPad devices. The agents I have spoken with at VRBO have delivered the worst customer service I've ever seen... that is, if you can stay on hold long enough to actually talk to someone!

I am a rental house owner.
HomeAway deactivated our listings last Friday afternoon without any warning. In an e-mail after the fact, HomeAway stated that our listing "contains messaging directing travelers to pay offline to avoid our online secure booking checkout system in violation of our content guidelines." That statement was incorrect on two facts: we only advised travelers that there were options available; and once I was able to find a working link to their "content guidelines" I found no such restriction. (I did print out the guidelines in case they try to alter them later.) Nevertheless we deleted the wording immediately and asked for our listing to be reactiavted. However, their "special team" that handles such cases conveniently does not work on weekends, so our listhings have been missing all weekend and as of now (Wednesday late afternoon) only one has been re-activated. Every time we call they inform us that they can't estimate when our case will be reviewed. It is extremely frustrating.

We have been among their top 5% earners for 9 years now and introduced many guests to their site, this is how we are rewarded? We have demanded a refund of our subscription for the time lost, but that is probably a hopeless cause. I have also suggested that they make their services optional, like HA's trip insurance used to be. I let them know that we've had several guests state that although they have been using VRBO for years (one since the 90s), they will be looking elsewhere in the future; there is a deep-seated animosity to the Ticketmaster business model. If travelers truly value their services, they will opt-in. But again, this seems a lost cause.

We feel that HomeAway/Expedia doesn't care about owners any more because basically they feel they don't need to. It is time for us to find other websites with some owner focus. We are joining HomeEscape dot com which is a new site operated by some HomeAway refugees. It is free but not well known, so we plan to let as many people as we can know about it. Please spread the word and let us know if you know any other options.