Community: Message List - VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:57:53 GMT

Since Carl Shepherd is the CFO for both companies HA and VRBO.....you all might want to write to him directly at the following email address and voice your concerns about their erroneous policies:

Carl Shepherd <cshepherd@homeaway.com>

Not that it will make a difference but why not try? Please share his response with the rest of us if you get one.

rboclark@aol.com

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:54:53 GMT

You should not renew your listing with these people. They are in bad faith and have a terrible business model. We must all ban together and find new travel websites that are reputable to redirect our business to. Please email me your personal email address for future reference as I am collecting as many email addresses from disgruntled owners as possible and if we have enough harmed owners we might be able to pursue legal action. I will also notify all owners of new websites that might work for them. I would suggest that you repost your ad to Flip Key or VRBO but it is unclear if VRBO shares their data base with HA and if your false review will post under VRBO. I have heard conflicting stories about this possibility. Please email me your email address to rboclark@aol.com so that we can add your name and email to our list.

Thanks for your comments.

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:48:52 GMT

Yes the same exact situation happened to me and yes "Nadia" the deliberator of the alleged revenge did the same thing to me. The renter did quite a bid of damage to my condo. I took photos and sent the renter the actual paid bills for the repairs that were deducted from his security deposit. He sent email after email demanding that i refund the monies for the repairs otherwise he will do "what he has to do" and that I learned was to post a false negative review. The review was so outrageously false that I had to cancel my VRBO contract to protect my business. When I spoke to Nadia and shared the false emails with her she also used the lame excuse that if the threats did not have the exact wording....."if you do not refund the entire security deposit I will post a negative review" she would not consider taking down the review. I even went as far as speaking with Carl Shepherd the CFO for VRBO/HA and he stated that if there is a threat of ANY KIND that he would take down the false negative review. I then emailed him the emails from my renter reflecting the threats and he too refused to take down the false review as promised. Hyperbole all the way with no substance. The gatekeepers at VRBO/HA are clearly in bad faith and do not mean what they say. Furthermore Mr. Shepherd alleged that the Wall Street tycoons that are going to fund his IPO have insisted that if all reviews are not posted that the IPO would not fly.....so there it is....follow the money ....and truth and integrity go out the window.

rboclark@aol.com

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:37:28 GMT

Hi Squirrelly,

I appreciated your informative email below. Would you mind sending me your private email address as I do have some questions regarding your email and would prefer to email you directly. Thanks...I can be reached at rboclark@aol.com.

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:52:56 GMT

Since VRBO was bought out by Homeaway, VRBO is basically homeaway now, run by the same call center in Texas.

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:38:18 GMT

I feel your pain as something similar happened to me on one of my listings. About six months into one of my HomeAway listings a guest wrote a very unfair review and my inquires came to a screeching halt. I posted all the positive comments from our guest book and we even had two positive 5 star reviews written about us but this did not help to overcome that one bad review. It was a totally vindictive review and many of things they stated were not true. What is worse is it has become a time sync in having to explain all the nonsense that was written and I just could not turn inquires into bookings on this one listing. Whereas my Flipkey and VRBO listings were doing fine. As a last ditch effort I tried the last month of the listing period to move up from basic to Gold to see if this would help and absolutely nothing.

It was time to renew this listing last week….I almost did out of pure impulse but HA customer service made it so difficult to move back to basic from gold that it gave me time to think about it. I said to myself…do you have a screw loose…why on earth are you renewing a listing with a bad review ? So this listing is going into the dead file…If I do decide to renew I will have to start all over again with a brand new listing…but for now I figured I can just do without HomeAway.

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:45:14 GMT

Maybe I will get in trouble for this maybe they will just remove the post but I will like to show you all how easy it is to alter an email without anyone knowing. An email is basically just a document, if you drag it on to your desktop (or save it on to your desktop) then right click it and choose Open with..then choose a text editor (ie wordpad, ms word, wordperfect) any is fine. When it opens scroll down, the giberish at the top are the headers, this is what VRBO/HA aka Nadia takes as an “authentic” email. As long as that stuff is there, they will consider it “real”. Anyway, scroll down past the headers (giberish) and eventually you will find the meat of the message, where you can change anything, add, delete, whatever you want. When your done, all you have to do is hit file (or round button at the top for ms office) Save As...then make sure at the end of the email title, it says .eml. Word may try to change it to .doc or .txt, but you can remove that make sure the end is .eml. Once you saved it, open an email to VRBO/HA aka Nadia, attach the .eml you just saved and done. You can do this to any email and I would be happy to help anyone with troubleshooting or better instructions.

Also VRBO/HA doesn't seem to care if reviews are real so why not just start making some up. VRBO/HA can't know it's you posting your reviews. So make an email address, go to Mcdonalds wifi and post away. Of course I would never do this, wink wink, nudge nudge, but if I did, I would know that the only thing VRBO/HA could see if my IP address, which is basically like your “street” address online. The only thing they know is which IP address a review is coming from so as long as your noting submitting a ton of reviews from the same Internet connect (ip address) VRBO can never know. So head down to wifi hotspots or wherever you can, you can also look into Proxy serviers which are so easy to use once you start. They basically “hide” your real address by routing you through another. So if you wanted to use a proxy server you can do this from the comfort of your own home and VRBO/HA aka Nadia will never know. VRBO/HA definetly sides with the guest no matter what so we need to protect our businesses, I'm happy to answer any questions or help anyone out.

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:45:00 GMT

We have a previous guest that booked on our cabins and paid half of the total to reserve it. 29 days before their arrival they call to cancel because they couldn't make it. If it is within 30 days of check-in we can't refund them anything but I was nice and decided to give them a 25% refund which I told them was about $100, no problem they said. The guest wanted to take the 25% as credit for a future stay so I told them to call me or email when they decide on their dates and I would send them a quote with the 25% credit included.

When I sent their quote they were furious because they decided to take 25% of the total amount instead of what they already paid then use the cancellation policy guidelines on our faqs page to try and shake me down for more money. They felt that their refund should have been closer to $300 because that was 25% of their total. At this point I thought you know what I am going to refund your money and be done with it. Then the calls began and the emails. Unfortunately the emails have no threats what so ever but the phone calls..I don't even pick up anymore.

We've already been hit with one bad review because a guest broke our TV so we kept the $100 deposit, the guests then wrote a horrible review in retaliation, this guest even went so far as to say in an email: ...[return my deposit] or I will take matters into my own hands. After providing VRBO/HA aka Nadia with all of our correspondence she concluded that the guest just wants their deposit back and since the words "I will right a bad review if your don't pay" weren't evident, there was nothing VRBO could do, the review stayed.

I decided to take a preemptive strike, I emailed VRBO to let them know what was happening. I got a long canned response back telling me that I'm basically SOL unless this person in an email states “I will write a bad review if you don't pay me”. So I decided to share my knowledge with the community encase this happened to anyone else.

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:03:57 GMT

Amazed at the response we have received from this post.....Keep signing up and we can be an effective force in weeding out problem guests!

Re: VRBO's New Policy to turn on Reviews

community-no-reply@homeaway.com — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:54:10 GMT

Bobbie32,

You might want to go read the article on msnbc about this very topic. A dentist tried to do this same thing in their contract about not being able to write bad reveiws about the dentist. She is now being sued.

You might want to first see if this is legal before you find yourself spending unecessary money defending your contract.

Kristin