HomeAway Vacation Rentals Reviews

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. HomeAwayVacationRentals 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 HomeAwayVacationRentals because I used it in the past. The share favorites with someone has disappeared. The “draw area” for search (a nice idea) causes HomeAwayVacationRentals to crash regularly. None of this should be happening for a company like HomeAway.

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.

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 HomeAwayVacationRentals 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. HomeAwayVacationRentals 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 HomeAwayVacationRentals has been lost. I am still giving HomeAwayVacationRentals 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.

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!

There is no way to scroll down in HomeAwayVacationRentals to read ALL reviews. You have to go on a pc to the vrbo site to see all the reviews. This is a critical feature that is needed because not everyone has a pc and depends on HomeAwayVacationRentals . Very important review information is not seen and this is supposed to be one of the features that’s makes your site appealing.
Also you can’t vote on helpfulness in the HomeAway app like you can on the vrbo website. This too is very important as owners can upvote good reviews by using other email addresses to push the good ones to the top. This is what is first seen when you go to reviews in HomeAwayVacationRentals . Again another reason why expoaing all reviews in HomeAwayVacationRentals is critical. We now have to pay a fee just to book with the site. So it’s time to start delivering features that allow a traveler to make the best informed decision. At some point not exposing all the reviews in HomeAwayVacationRentals is likely going to result in liability to homeaway if a decision is made on a property that had the information in a review that homeaway didn’t expose.

I was not able to access the property because the property owner completely scammed us. $530!! Home Away insisted that I had to
go through the property owner even though she turned off her phone and refused to answer a combined total of 17 calls, texts, and emails. Property owner took my money at booking and was unresponsive and the place was not accessible. Home Away was rude in their attempt to help me and ended up putting me up in a terrible hotel in their pathetic attempt to “make it right”. They claim to be an advertising platform but they are obviously a middle-man to potential scammers because they obviously have access to the property accounts. They continue to allow this scamming property manager to continue renting through their site without any repercussions and leaving us with no choice but to accept their terrible excuse for a replacement. I didn’t even intend to do business with Home Away!! I booked through Expedia because they are usually reliable, and ended up getting them without my knowledge. Oh and they also don’t do refunds and don’t stand by the customer. They would rather cater to the scammers that post on their page. Worst experience EVER!

After booking previously without issue I found a rental through Home Away for a trip to Vancouver this past summer. I booked and was approved, then the renter contacted me outside of HomeAwayVacationRentals and asked to transact directly. It’s a VERY long story but I found this suspicious and asked Home Away for advice and if this was against their policies. Home Away responded that it was not against their policies and that the renter had great reviews and told me not to worry.

Long story short, the renter is a HUGE scam artist who took me and many other Home Away customers for a ride. I was able to get a refund, and found other accommodations at 10:00pm at night in a strange city. I did however lose a lot of extra money due to a last minute desperate situation, I was put in harms way because of my dealings with some seriously shady people, and Home Away did NOTHING to help before or after the fact. I have contacted them after the event and sent details and further proof that they had done me and other customers a disservice. I guess they are too busy to be bothered because they never even followed up about my concerns.

I will never use this service again.

This home is a jewel. It is spacious, very clean, beautifully furnished and well maintained inside and out. The kitchen is well stocked with everything one will need to prepare snacks or a meal. We had a Women’s Retreat and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. There were 13 of us. We had plenty of sleeping space to sleep comfortably, as well as plenty of bathrooms. It is everything you would look for in a vacation rental. There are local stores nearby. It is easy to get downtown to San Antonio. This was our 4th Annual Retreat and this has been the best vacation rental we have stayed in thus far. Our goal is to visit a different state each year and I would not have any qualms in spending a 5th Annual Retreat in this home. Richard is awesome. If there was a 6 star rating, we will certainly give this home a 6 star rating!

I gave a 2 rating because we signed up for a property and found out the next day that the owner did not have it available at all and was unaware it was being shown on the HomeAway or VRBO sites.
Luckily we were able to find another property for the same 2-day weekend, but the cost was $500 more and not as good a fit for our family. While completing the process of that reservation, HomeAway offered damage insurance to finish the payment but I thought I had seen a damage waiver cost in the original fees. The website didn’t allow me to go back to look at the previous steps to review before making the decision about damage insurance.
Fortunately, a quick reply to a query I made to TurnKey explained the TurnKey damage waiver policy, so I was able to make an informed decision.
We had a bad experience with a HomeAway rental in Montecito CA last year for a wedding in Santa Barbara. We documented our complaints for that experience. We are hoping for a better result this time in the same Santa Barbara area. We will be happy to raise our rating based on a better experience.

NOW HOME AWAY! Expedia aka Home Away charges a “service fee” to the renter(s) based on the price/day x total days you’re booking it for. VRBO let owners post vacation rentals & renters could contact owner directly. We did this for many years for 2 condos in Maui. I recently booked 2 different condos (prior condos were sold) and one owner used a Real Estate company’s property management to handle payments & other “vacation rental” needs on the island as they reside in Washington. Unaware of this till way later. I HAD to enter my cc info to reserve, Home Away bam gets their fee. It also said full payment
due at time of booking. Done. NOPE! Got confirmation email from Home Away stating payment received a few times. Days later I get email from H A requesting payment. Then from the property management that I knew nothing about! What a hassle. Because H A stated “full payment at time of booking” and I had a difficult time getting direct contact info for the owner from H A
I just found this to be such a hassle! HOME AWAY, owner info needs to be easily accessible with their rental posts! You don’t own these properties!! Just be careful fellow travelers.

Love the selection, pics and details. Easy to use and this is my go to app for finding a place to stay while on vacation. The only problem I've had with it is that sometimes there is conflicting info. For example, I put in my dates (which was 4 nights), it showed me my options, I picked an option and then it said the owners had a minimum stay requirement and gave me the option to contact the owners to see if they would make an exception. So I proceeded to do that when the next screen popped up for me to go ahead and book it. That is confusing and nobody wants to book something and then find out there was some sort of mistake and you don't have a place to stay after all.
Another thing is that the fees are crazy high. You’ll think your paying one thing but by the time all the fees get added in your paying a lot more per night than what it looks. And HomeAwayVacationRentals doesn’t allow me to put in a property id# that I already know to pull up and see if it is available.

I was booking a cabin for a nice week getaway and the owner offered to give me a payment plan. He set up two payments and altered the price to what I’d be paying that day. Once I used the link provided for me, I put in my card information and the booking agency double charged me! I notified them of the problem and they placed a hold on my account. They said it would take 24-48 hours for them to let go of my money!! I went to the bank and the supervisor there said that they could get the money back to me quicker and all that HomeAway had to do was fax over a company letterhead stating that it was just a hold and that it is being released. I called HomeAway back and they said that they “ couldn’t “ do it, and that they don’t have the resources to. I was on the phone with representatives 7 different times just to get that answer. One representative even hung up on me. My money wasn’t release until 3 days later. The representatives that I talked to were very rude and unhelpful with the exception of one of them. I genuinely would not recommend this booking agency at all.

We recently rented a property listed at $55 a day we booked for 8 weeks they had the instant confirmation. At 2am we received a message from homeowner stating sorry not available for those dates money will be refunded. We start looking for a new rental and there it is available for the time frame we are putting into system but now for $65 a day. We called home away and they couldn’t seem to understand what we were saying there is a serious lack of English speaking reps when you call in. Now we are reading reviews before booking and keep finding repeatedly booked for months cancelled last minute by owner. Why do we have penalties for cancellations yet the owners do not? Why if the owner canceled repeatedly are they still allowed to advertise with you? We have heard from several people we know this has happened to them also. We have rented multiple homes through the years as have many of our friends but unfortunately your reputation is going down the drain because you are allowing this to continually happen.

We don’t care for having to put in our credit card info, just to confirm dates with property manager, then getting charged for each property inquiring on. We had to provide the info, in order to hit send for our message.
Originally, we booked & paid for one property. Money came out, we got a confirmation & we thought we were booked/confirmed. But, we got a notice of a refund & a message from property manager/owner that the dates were actually not available, even though the online booking system said that they were & allowed us to book it. Not very happy that happened & that we now have to wait for our refund. So, that is why we are now asking for date verification!! We should not have to have our credit card info charged, until we’ve settled on the property we want. They are booking fast for June and we had to do multiple date availability confirmation requests.
Has to be a better way, like it used to be.