HomeAway Vacation Rentals

I enjoy the application and it’s ease of use and our rentals have always been wonderful and exactly as described. I can easily and quickly filter on what I’m looking for, the prices are prominently displayed for clarity, instant booking is great and the ease of contacting the owner through the app is also top notch. I also like the ability to look at the cost breakdown, BUT here is where I PAY for all that convenience. This app used to be my go-to to find a reasonable, quality alternative to hotels! Not any more! Often the fees exceed the cost of the rental! What??? No, absolutely not, I won’t pay it, so I end up not booking with you more often than booking! The fees your app are charging owners are passed along to me and in some cases, are pushing prices WAY above even luxury hotels. The original purpose of the app has been lost. I am still giving the app a 4 because of all the great functionality. It’s a shame I can’t give it 5. Go back to your roots, lower the fees. Your model is inching out your original client base.

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I am a regular user of HomeAway and appreciate their service however I have two major issues hat I believe will be their downfall if not addressed: 1. Fees are not transparent and are becoming out of control. Rather than recognizing the opportunity to compete with the Airbnb’s of the world on fees it is as if they instead just jacked up fees across the board. Further, because the “price per night” does not include the fees and charges across properties are inconsistent, the search experience is much more time consuming and frustrating than it needs to be. HomeAway should provide the option to see price per night with fees as a search option at a minimum which would at least increase transparency. 2. The app is buggy. This is in acceptable for a product/company at this scale. Get it together and only release updates when they’re properly tested. Simple features like “favorites” are not synchronized at times with the desktop. The funny thing is that this wasn’t a problem until they apparently recently updated the app because I used it in the past. The share favorites with someone has disappeared. The “draw area” for search (a nice idea) causes the app to crash regularly. None of this should be happening for a company like HomeAway.

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I am giving a low score because Carolyn Nelson who manages the property Liten Hus in Minneapolis has stolen my money. I booked her place for this July 15-19th, 2019 and after booking I unexpectedly lost my job. I am a single mother of 2 and have had a really hard time with this adjustment. After losing my job I reached out to Carolyn to see if I could cancel my trip since I could no longer afford it. She informed me that if I wanted to cancel, as long as she was able to rebook the home on our dates then she would refund my money. She cancelled my booking and the home was available on my dates after that. I continued to watch to see if it got rebooked and noticed that it got fully booked for the whole summer including my original dates. Once I reached back out to her about receiving my money back she is not responding to me. I have every email that we have sent to each other and have the emails of her telling me she would refund my money. I am outraged and feel that she has stolen my money. If I would’ve known that she wasn’t going to give me my money back I would’ve just kept the trip booked and at least enjoyed the vacation. This woman is a thief and a liar and should not be allowed to do business on homeaway.

The HomeAway app is convenient, but there are a few things that could make it better. One very important thing that HomeAway needs to do is punish owners w a fee for not updating their calendars on a regular basis. The calendar/app says the property is available, so you submit a request. It can take a day for them to get back to you to say, “Oops, sorry, our days must be crossed. Can you shift your plans ahead 3 days?” Sure, I’ll just call the conference and tell them to postpone everything. And this happens over and over and over until you’ve wasted a week trying to book individual properties. In addition, the search function needs to be improved. It doesn’t include all possible properties, even though they make you think it does. For example, Pasadena & Altadena CA are adjacent cities. If you do a search for Pasadena, you might have 5 Pasadena properties & 1 from Altadena. This leads you to believe that there’s only one in range in Altadena. But then, do a separate Altadena search, and it gives you 4 additional properties! There’s got to be a better way to do the search on your phone.

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The two times I used HomeAway and didn’t have any issues with my reservation it worked just fine. However the third time there was some glitch with my reservation and I got double booked. One of the reservations I paid for, the other one I did not request so I did not pay for. I only inquired about availability and the Home Away app kept sending automatic messages assuming that I wanted to book and then annoyingly sending reminders for me to pay. I’ve tried in vain to find someway to cancel the erroneous booking. There is no way to get in touch with the human with HomeAway until after you finish booking. This has led to some tension between me and the person who’s home I’m trying to book. She keeps asking me to cancel so that her place is not showing up as busy in the calendar, I keep asking her to cancel so that I will stop getting annoying messages to pay for a booking I don’t want. The virtual assistant is useless on the in app chat. It can only regurgitate information that’s already available on the listing. Anything as simple as “how do I cancel pending reservations” seems to stump it!