We have rented houses from Breen for several years and have never had any problems with the houses or the staff, until now.
We booked Whispering Pines Hideaway which looked like a beautiful house from the description. Upon arrival to the house, there are NO curtains, mini-blinds, etc on ANY of the windows in the master bedroom. The other bedroom has a skylight with a queen sized bed.
No, there are no nearby neighbors but there was absolutely NO warning about this in the description of the house. I never would have booked it because of privacy concerns and I'm easily woken up. Having light stream into the bedroom at 6am isnt my idea of a relaxing vacation. No sleeping in for me.
The television pictured in the listing in the master bedroom isn't hooked up to cable or even local channels via rabbit ears. Again, no mention of this in the listing. The sole function we were told was to watch VHS or DVD's, because, hey, its 2017 and I travel with my VHS tapes.
The straw that broke the camel's back....our third day here, I wash my hair and remove hair dryer from drawer....wait for it. There is a post it note that says, "NOT WORKING." I tried to turn it on anyway, I can confirm, it was broken.
I scoured entire house for another blow dryer to no avail. I come up empty. Drive into town and go to drug store, no blow dryers. I go to grocery store, hardware store (typically carry blow dryers but were out, but had curling irons, go figure), and came up with nada.
I call Breen Vacation Station and talk to Maria...I ask if they have a spare I could borrow...nope. She calls the cleaning service to see if they have a spare, no.
Hair dripping wet, and we have paid $3600 for this house for 10 days and I have no blow dryer and we have dinner reservations for our friends engagement party. I tell Maria about all of the issues we are having and ask to move to a different house.
Informs me that isn't allowed and I ask to speak to owner/manager..,they are on vacation, how nice, probably somewhere that has hair dryers! Nobody would be able to get back to me until Tuesday (this was Saturday).
Maria brings a hairdryer to the house which is hers (it was extra she had, not her primary) after I ask her to go to another vacant house and get me one. This was nice of her, she wasn't the problem.
I ordered a blow dryer on Amazon Prime and had it delivered to the house here today at my expense after I was told I would have to drive over 30 minutes away and search in Morro Bay for one. Again, why is this on the guest/renter?
I dropped Maria's blow dryer off at the office and ahe wasn't there but the older woman who was clearly in charge was. She was very snarky to me when I said could you please give this to Maria and thank her for me.
The Breen manager told me sarcastically it was so nice of Maria to let me borrow her extra blow dryer...I said yes it was, but she never should have had to do that if someone had simply replaced the blow dryer.
She began to lecture me about Cambria being remote and blow dryers didn't grow on trees here. I pointed out that someone had gone to the trouble of placing a note on the dryer that said it wasn't working. This left her speechless for a moment and then blamed the cleaning company and the owner for not checking up on things.
Then she told me it wasn't the responsibility for the owner to provide a hair dryer! Unbelievable. No apology I had to spend afternoon driving around town looking for a hair dryer and then was responsible for getting a new one.
We were stuck as Breen already had our $3600 and they could care less about any problems renters have after collecting the money.
Never again will we rent from them....There are so many better options, ahem, Airbnb will probably put them out of business.
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