Bonnie M.

We have listed our beautiful lakefront cottage on VRBO/ Homeaway for at least 10 years. Initially, it was expensive to list, but we connected with wonderful families, many of who keep coming back summer after summer. In recent years, however, VRBO has taken more and more control over our property to the point that I feel I'm just a pawn in their money-grubbing game. First, if you didn't let them do your booking, they moved you way down the list. Next, they started charging our renters a fee to use the service and they used a third party "bank" which charged us a percent. Then, they told us the third party bank (Yapstone) was going to start charging an extra 3% to continue to send us our money in a timely manner. So... they told us to switch over to their new "banking" system to save the extra percentage. If we didn't, we'd move down the list! We switched and as soon as we did, they told us after reviewing our listing, we did not qualify for early pay-outs, and they'd be holding OUR money until the day after our guests check-in! WHAT? This is not only Bait and Switch, but a form of blackmail. We just received a booking for a week in August 2021 and VRBO is holding $1500 of ours until then! Is this legal? Please, PLEASE will another listing company step up to the plate so we can all switch over to you? I'm so over VRBO/Homeaway/Expedia's manipulation. Enough is enough!