HomeAwayReviews 1,748

We've been renting our French gites through Holiday Rentals (now Home Away) for the past 8 years, with fantastic results… until this year. Just one booking, the rest are all through Holiday Lettings. I'm not sure what has happened; a greedy new policy trying to tempt you to pay more for better search results hasn't helped. And judging from this page, a great many dissatisfied renters and owners. Feels like I've wasted a big chunk of our advertising budget, and I won't be looking to renew. Shame, after such a good service for so many years.

They are just an advertising space for unscrupulous property scams. Homeaway do nothing to resolve problems. They advertise properties but the location is not accurate. You wont be where you think you are. Being miles away caused me problems.
Owners don't respond and are not always genuine owner.
Very dangerous site andHA have no power to help once you have been scammed, sent to wrong accommodation and ripped off. Telephones manned by robots

Tried to reserve a property and began initial correspondence with the property owner. Home Away then sent me an email saying the property was a fraud and I should stop all correspondence. WHAT? You don't vet your properties before listing them on your website? Now some creep has my name and address, they are lucky I did not give this criminal my payment information. Their "security" department, just said, "Sorry, this one slipped through the cracks". Really? How can I ever trust that any property is valid. I would NOT use this site to list my rental property.

I had a good and honest visibility with fewo direkt and holiday rentals. Now all the small european sites have been inglobed by home away, and though i am a owner with 34 reviews, if you filter propriety by reviews, i am on the 3 page, after propriety with 2 reviews. Because i pay only the basic level, which is 3 times as much as what i paid with the former sites. I get almost no good requires, since the site has put so many proprieties on and give space only to the platinum ones. Living in a town like palermo, where rents are low, i can t make a honest policy to my guests having to pay so much for advertizing.do you know any other option?

I have been reviewing many of the properties that HomeAway has advertised and I asked about rental ******* in Barbados. When I inquired about the cost, the price doubled. When I emailed the manager back and asked why the price jumped, she stated that the rate was per room and we had eight in our group. I emailed back to say that the website states the rental basis is "per property" and does not say "per room". Her reply was that it's common practice with villa rentals. I was looking for complaints about this company when I came upon this SiteJabber site. I'm so glad I did. I will avoid at all cost!

Absolute rubbish. I have been advertising with home away for the past 3 year, but then they are taken over by american company and are no buying every other advertising website on the web.

They listed my property wrongly and at the wrong price and as of today, are still listing properties around my area incorrectly, it is an absolute joke and a disgusting way to treat customers

With the threat of legal action I was refunded my 12 months subscription as their changes were not what I paid for ( I was 10 months into subscription)

The bad thing is that as they now own most of the internet, it is virtually impossible to find a site that actually works that is not owned by them.

If you are an advertiser, do not get involved. Since the changes, my page views have gone from 260 a month to 20,. This is due to that fact that they have absolutely saturated the market and there is just too much to choose from. Given that I pay over £1000 to advertise, I would expect better

£1000 is a hell of a lot of google ads and guess what, business is booming since leaving the sinking ship of home away and using google ads

If I could give them a zero, I would. I really wish I would have seen this site and read these reviews before renting a homeaway.com property. We had a great experience until it came time for the property owner to return our security deposit. At that point she started talking about "extra cleaning" that was needed and "damages". We did not damage the property and even vacuumed before our departure! After getting no where with her, I filed a complaint with homeaway and they basically told me I am on my own. Don't use this site!

This is a terrible website with lousy customer service. I encountered one of the worst people I have ever met when I rented a property through Homeaway. She (and her husband) was insulting and rude. The property did not fit the description and, when I calmly and politely confronted her about this, she immediately began yelling and told me to get off her property. I don't want to relive the experience by writing too much detail now, but, suffice it to say, that when I contacted Homeaway about my experience, I never hear anything back! I gave them plenty of opportunity to correct the situation, but they chose to ignore me. I plan on doing everything I can to bring attention to this horrible situation so that no one else ever has to experience what I did; this level of apathy should not go unpunished. What a horrible, horrible company.

We had a home owner cancel our reservation 2 days before the date even after they had deposited our full payment and told us it was available. I would not use this site if you want any guarantee of the quality of your stay. They appear to favor home owners over renters including the censorship of renters that do not give favorable views. They reject reviews about instances like mine citing that you need to have stayed at the place to review it. Also, if you look through the site you will see a very low frequency of negative reviews, most likely due to their owner friendly screening process.

L have recently had a bad experience with this site as a renter for a rental property(#*******/ #*******)
In Barbados.My $500 usd deposit has been taken. They were great & prompt replies to all my emails until the wire transfer of my $500 usd was completed. After that l emailed this property owner for confirmation of payment/dates booked & no reply. L waited 1week & then request to cancel/refund & since then after numerous emails & un-answered phone calls still no refund nor any assistance from this site. Please dont throw your money away.

I used to belong to Holiday Rentals, a good little site but then they were consumed by Homeaway, a greedy, grabbing American site. It is now so enormous that it virtually does what it wants and takes no notice of us the customers who own gites. There are so many gites in our area of the Dordogne that visibility is a real problem. The only way to be really visible is to pay three times the going fee to belong to the Platinum level. If I paid to use HA's credit card system this would make me even more visible but why should I and may renters pay for something which can easily be done privately by free bank transfer?. Renters beware, the review system isn't very honest. Many of us have really good genuine reviews posted independently by holiday makers, but HA allows some owners to post loads of 'owner submitted reviews'. These rely on the honesty of the owner and some of them are probably bogus... who knows.
If I could advertise with someone else and be sure that I could get the bookings that I do, (we have 12 weeks booked already for next year) I would, but this greedy company has a virtual monopoly of the market. They provide no decent customer service and each time that I have phoned about an issue, they offer platitudes and then have the gall to ask me if I want to pay for their payment system. If you think that Ryanair and O'Leary are devious, then I can assure that HA is worse.

According to my recent experience with a dishonest property owner, I would recommend everyone to avoid using homeaway.com for the following reasons:

- Homeaway does not help you nor protect you if you have a problem with a property owner.

- The customer service team never replies in detail to your queries (you will receive automated replies).

- It seems Homeaway only post positive reviews about property, which lead to biased judgements by customers.

I have lost more than £500 because an owner refused to refund me duplicated charges and the security deposit of my rental. Despite several letters, emails or calls to Homeaway, I never got my money back!