Are Sales Calls Abundant on vrbo?
xtinad Aug 20, 2011 5:57 PMI just joined vrbo. Within an hour of making my listing (although it won't be showing up in the actual search engine for a day or two) I get a call from some guy who was trying to set me up with tenants from Ryan Air. First off this seemed fishy to me because Ryan Air doesn't fly to California! He kept referring to my place as an apartment, where its actually a house and asked a few questions that were clearly answered in my listing, so did he even really read my posting? Then he went on to say multiple tenants long term, which just made no sense to me. By then I was getting really confused and my scam radar was going off. Then he told me to go to alwaysonvacation.com. I asked, um why are you making me go to this website? And he said, oh this is where your tenant will finalize their rental with you. But then I went to the site and it was a vrbo competitor..and I was like..woah woah woah wait a minute..is this a freaking sales call you are trying to get me to pay to post my listing on your site? He finally admitted the runaround and said yes. And I said, hey I don't appreciate your wasting my time on a sales call, and pretend for the first 3 minutes that you are an inquiring tenant. He was very persistent in trying to sell me his site until I just hung up on him.
I joined vrbo, which surely isn't cheap, to avoid the bs, and to avoid having to sift through all the scammer/weirdos that I was getting on craigslist. Have others truly been happy with the vrbo service, or should I be expecting a lot of weirdos to sift through on this site as well? I would hope for 450 bucks a year that I'd have a little less headache this time around.
What really confuses me though is this...HOW did he get my listing when its not even approved to show up in the vrbo browser yet? I am under the impression unless you have the exact listing number it cannot be found yet. I asked him this, and he said he typed into yahoo 2 bedroom Berkeley rental...which I did and I did not show up..he flat out lied. This worries me, is VRBO or homeaway somehow being hacked so as soon as you sign up with them salesmen are getting your posting before its even available to the public, or they are getting a phone list from vrbo since it doesn't even seem as if he read my posting!