HomeAway United Kingdom 

DO NOT BOOK WITH THIS COMPANY - AVOID total scam booked June 2019 for Christmas 2020 with free cancellation to October 2020. Cancelled in July and told a refund would be issued. After chasing this company and the property owner I have finally had a reply to say no refund will be issued. How is this free cancellation. Total scam of a company wouldnt even give it one star

We booked a large house for May in Kent. This ended up being during lockdown and there began the problem. After a lot of emails the prop manager eventually agreed to reschedule for Oct half term.
We are a party of 11 and the booking confirmation clearly says 6 adults and 5 children.
Sadly given the rule of 6 now in place (which is law) we can not go.
The property owner will not refund/reschedule as he says and I quote "the property can still be used by all members allbeit within the law laid out by the Govt.....""The rate for the property is the same if booked by 1 or 12 persons" - really- who would book a house for 12 & pay for that if they were a sole traveller. In any event we are 11 and that was known. He says the booking confirmation for 11 people is nothing to do with him its from Home Away and hes not bound by it.
I offered to reschedule again - he refuses.
I have left messages on HomeAway 'contact me/complaint' chat - no one bothers to answer.
I intend to sue very soon !

Update - further to the message below from HA stating that they have sent me a private message THEY HAVE NOT. I was asked for the ref number which I had already supplied when I posted the review and heard NOTHING since. Their response appears to be for show only !!!

Very difficult to get hold of anyone. Have been cut off several times. My Travelnest account no longer recognises my name/password. Feedback form sent in June but holiday had been postponed, and taken last week, but no feedback form sent this time. Phone number ending 1971 on company info not functioning. Very poor quality cottage, dirty, owners denying responsibility via rude email to me.

This whole company seems to run by Aamir as that is the only name that ever appears on any correspondence. They are not interested in helping one little bit when things go wrong - BEWARE - DO NOT RECOMMEND

For anyone booking the luxury Tenerife property #6956196 described as 'Golfside Hideaway, Infinity pool, 5BDRM' in Adeje, Canarias I recommend you DONT. The property owner cannot be trusted. I booked and had to cancel 1 week later due to Coronavirus. They promised refund in 2 weeks. It is now over 4 weeks and no refund. They ignored my last email about it.

AVOID! SCAMMERS!!!

We chose a cottage yesterday and were told it would cost £1180 approx with an immediate deposit of £396 approx. Gave c/c details for deposit. Showed kids the house; everyone happy and excited for next years holiday.

Then, later in the evening the owner emailed me saying the house would cost £800 MORE than the first price to reflect next years fees.

With HomeAway, all communication is faceless and there is no redress or person to complain to, no emails, no way of raising the issue! The owner has the upper hand entirely.

This is the perfect platform to scam people. We won’t be paying the extra £800 however, I’m sure some people would do so believing they’re in some sort of contract.

By the way, should you still want to use them, avoid ‘WOODGATE’ farmhouse (near Crackington Haven, near Bude), as this is the house the owner tried to scan us with.

I transferred money to the given bank account in order to finalize the renting procedure. It's been one week already and I heard nothing from them. I only informed that a kind of technical error came up and they will not accept the money but send it to me back. I'm worried about the money I sent. I can't also contact owner, she doesn't reply my emails too. It's so unpleasant when especially you need a document confirming your accomadation and only three days left to your visa application. I don't recommend using HomeAway for renting.

There is a clear error regarding ‘Internet’ being listed on the property page & WIFI. Our property is listed as WIFI (with it being specified in a certain area). However on the HomeAway site it clearly states Internet at the very top & unless you scroll down & open another page you will not see the WIFI specification. Also on the APP the WIFI box is checked clearly stating the location & the Internet box is not checked so why does it say Internet on the front page when travellers are booking?? I have spent over an hour today on the phone to HomeAway because of a very upset traveller who had booked the property because of the stating of INTERNET. I called HomeAway to point out the issue & was basically told I would have to deal with any sort of compensating, It was not their issue even though they are responsible for the site?!!. I was told there are no supervisors or managers available. I called back later as that clerk wasn’t very helpful to advise that I’m prepared to offer some form of compensation to the traveller but HomeAway should hold some responsibility as it was their website that is stating the misleading information- even though the clerk could clearly see the error. Again I was blocked from speaking to any supervisor or management With the clerk saying they weren’t available, she doesn’t know how to contact them etc- She said I could just leave ‘feedback’ & she was very Very rude, condescending & nonchalant in her responses. I finally got through to another clerk where I insisted a callback request logged from a senior- whether that will happen, we shall see. All I would want is for the misleading Internet listing removed or sorted so it doesn’t happen to others & for HomeAway to also compensate the customer as why should we lose out & HomeAway still take their percentage when it is their fault?? This is so disappointing & we intend to remove our property from their site based on the outcome of this.

No your response is useless because we spent time on the phone with the rude customer service clerk changing this and that and nothing worked- she acknowledged the error on the site. Your site has an ERROR - it’s states INTERNET even when the INTERNET box is blank and not checked -when the WIFI box is checked. You are misleading travellers & by telling them a property has INTERNET when it only has WIFI in public areas like ours. Very very bad of you. YOU SHOULD SPELL CHECK YOUR RESPONSES ALSO. Makes you look even more unprofessional.

By the way still no call from supervisor or manager- I have since contacted them on the same generic number & have informed them to cancel & remove our listing. They said it has to be via email to which we responded. The listing has now been 'hidden' & we are waiting for its permanent removal. HORRIBLE HORRIBLE COMPANY. DO NOT LIST YOUR PROPERTY WITH THEM.

I have had my property with Home Away for some years it has progressively got worse and worse. I have now taken my property off this site. since it became a big company it is totally incompetent. One side doesn't talk to the other. I have spent hours and hours sorting out refunds for guests. Their system is diabolical, their accounting side is incomprehensible. I would think twice before you think about putting your house on this site.

Booked a holiday online, simple you would think?

Well it turns out the property I booked was already booked and the owner had told homeaway multiple times that it needed to be not listed as available.

So they billed me £1000 anyway. I thought I would get a refund as it's a simple mix up. Wrong! The owner refunded me by cheque the amount she owed me (£800) but despite promises that homeaway will refund me the £200 they owe me, so far they have only refunded half of it, so for there total incompetence I am £100 out of pocket.

Stay clear!

The one star was for the prompt replies from Homeaway staff who tried to help but all was a waste of time. We had to cancel our villa due to the covid 19 crisis. Cancelled well in time for a guarenteed 100% refund of my deposit. Owner had no funds and asked for 3 months to refund deposit which I agreed, but after 3 months the owner still cannot refund!!
Homeaway have nothing to do in helping with this matter so be aware of their Payment Protection Guarentee which only applies to Homeaway and the owners getting their money - not you!
Homeaway is just a sales platform for owners. Do not trust them for your travels. Do not use.

Booked trip to Italy pre covid. Booking terms were 100% refund if cancelling 14 days pre arrival. Airline cancelled flights 51 days before arrival, so I had to cancel. Owner advised refund fine. Then came out with some nonsense that the payment system had changed and they could not refund only offer a voucher. Then they stopped messaging. When they processed the cancellation they changed my stay dates so it looked like I had cancelled the day before arrival in a bid to look like I was outside of the 14 days. Home away have been utterly useless at investigating this and rectifying it. The owner WP Relais continue to advertise on their site and continue to show 14 day full refund. It’s a disgrace / frankly blatant theft through fraudulent behaviour and home away condone it. Avoid at all costs.

EDIT NOVEMBER 3RD: FUNDS HAVE NOW BEEN LOCATED AND RECEIVED.

We had booked a house in Barcelona for the summer and cancelled in May 2020 the booking in agreement with the owner. The owner requested the deposit (nearly 3 thousand Euros !) to be refunded to us, and Homelidays / HomeAway informed us that the refund was allegedly initiated on June 5th.
Except we never received the money !! We have sent tons of emails to their generic email address and each time we would receive the same reply : the refund has been done with "ARN" reference XYZ.... HomeAway even requested a letter from our bank confirming that they could not find the money and when we gave them the letter, they totally ignored it and replied that the ARN reference is self sufficient, and that we should insist with our bank (and rest assured that we did). All we have from HomeAway is an email with this weird reference number, no official document, no screenshot evidencing that the wire-transfer actually happened.
Our bank (one of the leaders in Europe) has been unsuccessfully looking for this transaction over the past 2 months along with the back office, now they have asked me to file a complaint against this company, which I will.
I have received numerous refunds since I purchase on the internet back from the late 90's, and I must say this is a first. I do not believe they ever sent any refund and I advise to stay away from HomeAway and their affiliates companies.
With insight I feel stupid that I did not browse on trustpilot before as there are experiences similar to ours.

DO NOT use this company!! I have written other reviews for this company. We finally received an email from HomeAway customer services on the 31st August 2020, providing us an ARN number for our refund for the EUR420 we paid as a service fee. This refund has been ongoing since beginning of July. The property owner James Villas gave us a full refund straight away and in the HomeAway terms and conditions they state they will refund their service fee if the property owners cancel the booking which they did. Now I know it’s not a lot of money but I was unhappy from the offset when they charged that huge fee for doing not a lot. My bank were given the ARN number and after 2.5 weeks they finally said today they can’t locate it. I am now of the strong belief that they never sent the payment! I cannot be bothered with their incompetent staff and have now passed it to my bank to deal with.

Awful awful awful. If I could give no stars I would. I am an owner of a listed property. This used to be our absolute favourite website provider, best most caring guests and most of our bookings came through this site. Since change of ownership a few years back it has been nothing but pain. In my forth attempt to resolve an issue for one of my guests, after an hour of being online chatting (because this company is impossible to get hold of!) I was cut off. Diabolical service; and my guest will still be returned the incorrect refund because the 'agent' could not pass the correct information to the correct department. I am fuming. If I was not experiencing financial hardship I would categorically remove my listing. This is the most expensive website to book through with regards commission payments. If you are a guest looking for accommodation, search for the same listings on other sites (we are usually listed on more than one) they are usually significantly cheaper as a result of cheaper commission fees.

Received a garbled message from HomeAway in response to my comment below. This bears no relation to my complaint. Am still fighting as there has been no response to my e mail or any returned phone call. Next step will be legal help. I repeat, stay away from this company. Awful awful awful !!!!

Am still fighting for a full refund after refusing to stay in a dirty apartment in Cardiff. I have contacted HomeAway numerous times and given them all the necessary feedback to issue a full refund, as I was originally promised. Now they are arguing the fact! I could not stay in the apartment as it was Covid unsafe. I sent photographs, have been promised call backs. None of the call backs happen! There is no support from this appalling company. Am still waiting for the return phone calls. Their attitude is despicable. Don’t book any property through this company. Giving 1 star was 1 star too many!

Appalling customer service regarding the refund of damage deposit. nearly two weeks overdue with no logical explanation. Got fed-up waiting for someone to answer the phone so tried their chat. The operator disconnected (not even a thank you/good bye) when they realised they were unable provide a date for the refund or a logical explanation for the delay.
It'll need a seismic shift before I use HomeAway again.

Received a response from HomeAway and as expected, nothing tangible or even a part admission that their customer service skills are lacking the basics. I stand by my comment regarding seismic shift!

Booked a holiday and the house was filthy from the previous tenants. This is obviously unacceptable and all the more so during the current pandemic. Started cleaning the place ourselves and decided that there was too much to do and so just left. Homeaway answered our first support email and has left the next 6 emails unanswered. Calls to them are not much better: I'm hung up on half the time and the other half am told that the issue is being looked into. Avoid these guys at all costs. I've had to use customer support with AirBNB before and can confirm that they at least resolved my issues in a matter of days.

Utterly useless in COVID-19. As they keep saying in their responses to negative reviews - they are an advertising platform only and as such have no power whatsoever over the owners, or intermediaries such as Travelopo. I called them to ask what they would do - and was told (on repeat) that my agreement was with Travelopo. Couldn't even bring themselves to say there was nothing they could do. They refer to 'encouraging owners to issue refunds' but then refer to rental agreements with owner or intermediary. The fact that their COVID policy has not been updated since 31st May says it all. They still have not issued a refund of their traveller fees - total shambles.

Updated to respond to HomeAway's reponse - thank you for your reply - that's a first. Whilst you may have issued guidance, your property manager clearly chose to ignore these and neither a flexible credit, nor partial refund were offered. And you refused to get involved. And you still have not replied to my email requesting a refund of YOUR service fee. My 'Utterly useless' still stands therefore.

Is this company going bust??? I am a property owner and have been waiting for my payments since mid July!! Not a penny has been received by me. I have emailed and called numerous times. They refuse to put me through to or give me phone numbers for Finance dept or Legal dept. Keep saying they are escalating the issue. No one has got back to me and yet another week has passed. Stick to other platforms for advertising!!