I want to share a story about a recent nightmare experience I had with Vacation Rental By Owner (VRBO) at the Silverado Lodge in the hope that I can help others avoid what has happened to me.
VRBO and another company, HomeAway, are both owned by Expedia. Through them, I booked a condo in Park City, Utah for 4 nights which I prepaid in full, as they require, a month before arriving. After receiving no information from VRBO or the property owner in response to my questions about how to find the property (a simple message telling me it was in the Silverado Lodge would have been very helpful), I finally found it amongst condo complexes and hotels on a very dark mountain road with no visible street numbers on buildings. Much to my surprise and dismay, after lugging all my gear up to the unit, I discovered it looking as you see in these pictures. Not only was it much smaller than it appeared in the images on VRBO, the main problem was that it clearly had not been cleaned since the last renters left. There was also extremely awful-smelling trash that they had failed to empty in the can right near the front door of the unit. Lovely.
By this time it was 12 am (2 am my time) and after much effort I managed to get someone from VRBO to locate my reservation and provide me the phone number of the property owner, a man named Lee Wyckoff. (I had discovered earlier in the day, the "call the owner" function on VRBO's app was disabled.) Instead of apologizing and agreeing to pay for me to stay in a clean room that night as would have been the only decent thing to do, Mr. Wyckoff questioned whether I went to the correct unit and said he would have to "investigate" the situation.
Long story short, I had to spend 2 nights in another much more expensive unit in the Silverado Lodge because the next day when I went back to the original unit it was still not clean. There were little bits of toilet paper on the bathroom floor around the toilet. And I wondered whether the towels that looked like they had been folded by a 5-year old, or the sheets under the comforter which was carelessly tossed on the bed, were even clean. I tried to reach the owner to explain what I'd found the second time around, but once again my call when straight to voicemail. He did not respond to my voice or email messages.
As you can imagine, I had to try VERY hard not to let this ridiculousness ruin my brief and much-needed time on the slopes. Early on day three I went back to see if the room had finally been properly cleaned. The unit I had been renting was reserved by someone else for the night. When I went to open the door and drop off my bags, I discovered that my keycard didn't work. The person at the front desk told me that Mr. Wyckoff had instructed them to deactivate it. So instead of getting the unit professionally cleaned, he instead chose to deny me access to something I had prepaid for IN FULL. I was left with nowhere to stay for the last two nights of my trip, at peak time in Park City when there were almost no available rooms in the entire village. I had to spend the morning scrambling to find somewhere to stay other than in my rental car on the side of the mountain. I managed to find something at a hotel up the road, but it cost me a fortune.
Despite my repeated requests since returning home, VRBO/Expedia refuses to do anything to help me recover any of the $2500+ I spent as a result of Mr. Wyckoff's actions. They claim they are simply a marketing site and it is completely up to renters to try to get property owners (even dishonest ones) to do the right thing. They even say privacy laws prevent them from telling me about any action they will take against Mr. Wyckoff. (My guess is nothing.) Mr. Wyckoff has refused to reimburse me the money I paid in advance for his filthy unit, OR for the two nights I had to rent another room because he failed to clean the property, OR for the two nights I had to stay at another property because he literally locked me out of the unit I had paid for.
So it seems like other than giving Mr. Wyckoff a bad review on VRBO (I have no idea how long VRBO will keep it posted), the only recourse I have is to file a suit in small claims court. However that will require me to go back to Utah and/or hire a lawyer, and there is no guarantee I will be able to collect from Mr. Wyckoff if I win.
Apologies for the very long post, but PLEASE help me spread the word about VRBO's terrible policies and the bad eggs they allow to rip people off through their site. Incidentally, I learned that unlike VRBO, Airbnb holds renters' payments until after the trip in order to provide some assurance that property owners don't do what I had done to me. I will never, ever use VRBO again, and I'm going to explore whether there is anything else I can do to help make sure others don't end up in my situation. Any advice people have is much appreciated. read more