HomeAwayReviews 1,748

I stayed in the home last summer 2018 and the house was amazing. You walk in to the Kitchen from the 4 car drive way and then into the living room where there are (3) 4' x 7' picture windows looking over the beach and ocean. I could have spent the whole week in there. Although this is not a party house as the house is in a quiet residential neighborhoodthe neighbors on the north were very friendly and the ones to the south were essentially never there or hide very well. The home owners were very nice and did a lot for the guests. There were ample towels and all the amenities one could ever need. I highly recommend this vacation home for a lovely vacation. See the photo I took from the porch of the Beach, Ocean & Prouts Neck at the crack of dawn. Albert

I hope this review helps someone! Before signing up for Home away beware of the following:
1. HomeAway only allows a certain number of declines (you personally get to accept favorable or decline unfavorable guest) before they permanently freeze your account and require that you pay $599.00 to have the ability to properly screen all guest. The quality of guest that search their site for short term rentals is limited and HomeAway does a terrible job of protecting home owners from cases of Fraud, etc.
2. Once your guest is accepted, HomeAway uses a 3rd party company YapStone to make all deposits. Deposits are made on the day that your guest books and you will be responsible for funds until 30 days after guest checks out. Please see below for the importance of this statement.
3. HomeAway does a terrible job of screening their guest and worst of all, if you end up with a terrible guest that trashes your place and decides to file a false claim with their credit card company, HomeAway will withdraw ALL funds from your account and will hold them for 60 Days until dispute is complete. You are responsible for ALL Banking Fees caused by their withdrawl.
4. HomeAway's customer service is absolutely terrible and get ready you are in for a 25-60 minute phone call EVERYTIME. Most customer service reps are overseas and are very hard to understand and In the rare event you are able to speak with a customer service representative from the United States, you are let down by the lack of training that representative has received.
5. HomeAway's customer service representatives are very rude and combative. The situation you may be calling in for usually goes from bad to worst because of lack of training and their excessive need to decline your request to speak with a manager.

These are only a few of my gripes with HomeAway... STAY AWAY.

I own a vacation rental home in P. A. A renter complained of ONE BED BUG! Of course he wanted a refund after spending one night and contacted me the next morning! All my beds have bug protectors! HOME AWAY TOOK ME OFF THE SIGHT BELEIVING THE RENTER! I HAD TO HAVE A PROFESSIONAL EXTERMINATOR COME AND INSPECT. NO BED BUGS! HOMEAWAY REFUSING TO TAKE DOWN THE RENTERS FALSE AND DECEITFUL REVIEW! I HAVE HAD SEVERAL 5 STAR REVIEWS AFTER THIS SCAMMER AND THEY STILL REFUSE TO TAKE DOWN THAT SCAMMERS REVIEW! STAY AWAY FROM HOME AWAY!

I booked through home away 5 moths prior to my stay. When I landed at 5pm the night of my stay I still had not received the check in info from the owner via email or phone. I called the owner 5 times, left 3 voice message, sent a message through their app, and tried unsuccessfully to locate the property myself all between 5 and 10pm. Had they bothered to place their help number anywhere in the app I would have called them too. It was in the mid 30s and raining. I went a found a hotel room in the next town about 35 miles away. I was laying down to sleep when the owner of the Red Pheasant in Moscow Idaho finally bothered to return my call at 11pm. The owner was willing to only refund about 40% of my fee. I though no problem Book with Confidence Guarantee Home away will take care of this. Wrong. That guarantee is crap they did not even try to help I was told to try and work it out with the owner myself. Complete BS will no use them ever again.

We booked our accomodation to San Francisco a month ago. But right before our trip the Northen California fires started and the air in San Francisco was so bad that everything was closed (schools, museums, transportation). People were running away from there because the air was dangerously unhealthy. Of course we did not go and I emailed both Homeaway and the owner of the house we rented from asking to reschedule our trip. I never asked for cancellation. I asked to reschedule!

We have never received any respond back neither from Homeaway nor from the owner. Almost 4 thousand dollars is gone!

I will never ever use this website again. Disgrace!

I booked this unit months before my vacation. The owner took payment in full immediately. Many issues: flat dirty, heavily scented sheets and towels, owners unhelpful and disrespectful. I left after staying 2 nights of a 7 night booking. HomeAway customer service led me to believe that they would pursue the complaint case. After making a formal complaint days after I left and calling multiple times in the past month today I finally got a final response from the highest level of their customer service. There will be no financial recompense and further more because the 2 week review window is closed and because the owner gave me a negative review on my HomeAway profile I am not able to make a review of this rental. This is the last time I will every use HomeAway... they take absolutely no responsibility for the properties they list and though they say that traveller feedback is important for the protecting fellow travellers my honest feedback was denied.

I used this service years ago and it was great. Now? HORRIBLE! They use some payment provider from the Philippines and they control and dictate when and how monies are collected, disbursed, and if and when a client should receive back their deposit monies. It takes 3 months for a homeowner to see the money collected for a rental! I don't like the way it's set up now, way worse than even Paypal which I vowed never to used again for as long as I live. This business has been farmed out oversees and they could care less. No way I can operated a business like this. They have there teeth sunk way in to the control of the money and I can just see many people getting burned. Will be using a Realtor and paying more money!

We have been forced to move from Bookabach, a very stable booking site we have used for several years, to HomeAway. We are very frustrated as property owners, with the way HomeAway run their site. Our first issue is that we have a manager of the property (I am an owner). Our property manager is not able to be a 'reservations only' manager, but use my log in details to access the HomeAway account. HomeAway have not facility to separate managers and owners. This is very dodgey. Also, when trying to use the HomeAway website, when I click on some links, they will not load or dont work. Our bookings have dropped off tremendously, not that I am surprised with the extra fee's HomeAway charge. Also, they ask for all money up front very early, and release it slower then I think they should. We were told the funds were released to our account on the 13th, and they took a week to appear in our bank account. This is a small irritation as we aren't waiting on the funds. But all these issues add up to super big frustration. HomeAway is an amateur outfit at best. Can anyone suggest another short term accommodation platform we can use please?

Answer to Carmelita: The host has admitted her mistake and returned our money. Just FEWO-direkt and HomeAway are sitting on what´s obviously their share of the loot and wont admit their error and return our money. Unfortunately they have the nasty habit of sending you only "NO Reply" emails, so you can´t really communicate with them.
Use only AirBnB if you want to be sure not to be cheated by that bunch of crooks at FEWO and HomeAway.

We have listed multiple properties with Homeaway.com and have finally pulled the plug. We most recently hosted a couple who stayed at our condo for two nights. They've been gone for two days and we still haven't received payment. We called and were told that since it's a new listing (even though we've been using them for years on other properties) we won't receive payment for 30-40 days until AFTER they've vacated. Well, they've been gone for two days. This is nothing more than a cash flow issue for them. They are so cash-strapped that they're floating their books. Total scam. Take your money to Airbnb. We have NEVER had that issue with them.

We are two Finnish married couples who hired in Venice an apartment (clean but quite cold) in Calle del Remedio 4407 in Castello1.-8. 10. 2018., in the center of Venice. The bedrooms are large, but the tiny, uncomfortable kitchen was the only place where we four could sit together and chat. There are not enough hangers for clothes and no coat rack! And only three undamaged drinking glasses for four people. On Saturday the boiler got broken and we had to be two days without warm water. Because it was the weekend no repairman was available, I paid 300 euro guarantee payment. Our contact person promised that HomeWay will refund it immediately but I haven't seen it so far in my band account.

Homeaway is nothing short of evil.

I see so many reviews here from folks that had bad experiences with rentals. The main reason for this is homeaway policy of blocking communications between guests and owners before the guest pays. Homeaway charges travelers a so called service fee, that they call the "book with confidence guarantee" This charge is the main reason why they do not allow owners and travelers to communicate and seeing from all the horrible reviews here homeaway does not live up to that promise they simply take the fee from the travelers.

Before homeaway and airbnb and tripadvisor took over the home rental business there were wonderful websites that simply charged owners a reasonable advertising fee to connect travelers with owners. These sites such as VRBO, Holiday-rentals, holiday lettings and so on have all be taken over by these 3 big companies and now they have a monopoly. They can charge owners and traveler whatever they want because they control Google by paying them millions of dollars each year to suppress owners personal websites.

Do a Google search for a rental in any location and you will never see an owner's website but believe me there are millions of owner's personal websites out there. We are just invisible.

Some things to do.
1) Try to find owners directly or on sites that do not charge a traveler fee I would list a number of them here but it would be considered advertising.

2) If you stay at a great home keep the owners information so you can find them again and #bookDirect it will save you HUGE amounts since these companies charge you as much as 20% in service traveler fees.

3) If you have been hosted by a great owner share the information with friends and family and POST POST great reviews of their PERSONAL website so you help give them a chance to be visible.

Search Google for "No Traveler service fees" or look on facebook for owners directly.

This is a horrible time in vacation home rentals and unless we the owners and traveler work together it will only get worst.

We have used Homeaway few times and never had any issues until our last trip. There were issues with the Landlord and Homeaway shamelessly protected the Landlord. The person I contacted at Customer Service, was talking at me, not to me and refused to help me. We have another trip in November and this time, for the first time, we have used Airbnb. Considering the cost for Homeway, they should care about the travelers a bit more. Without us, the Landlords would not rent their places. I will avoid Homeaway in the future and would not recommend them to anyone anymore.