The countdown is on :-(

We're now just five days away from severing ties with VRBO and it's with mixed feelings.  I still haven't dug deep into their Pay-Per-Booking platform and I don't want to as I've heard nothing but bad things for both VR owners and travelers.  Just how many hoops and how high can they make us jump??? 

For owners they're making this a nightmare and sucking any potential profit away.  We personally are for the budget-conscious and have a very slim profit margin to begin with but I'm simply not going to work as hard as I do to actually operate at a deficit.

Top that off and they also ream the traveler with their assorted fees they try to hide in various way but the nastiest of those is they make it appear the Owner is the recipient of the "fees" and we're NOT ALLOWED (please read that again -- grown, adult owners of their own properties who pay the mortgages, property taxes, etc. on these properties are NOT ALLOWED!) to tell the Guests that VRBO/HomeAway is actually the recipient! 

That's right folks -- We don't get the money but we are supposed to suck it up and cover for the greediest company I've ever encountered.   You say, how can they make us do that?  They also are forcing us to use their email servers and they are allowed to read all exchanges.  That's right Big Brother is watching and they've got bots in place to redact certain information and to automatically flag other stuff to point it to a rep at the company and they can shut down an ad on their site without hesitation and never to be seen again. 

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has come to life in this company.

I've got mixed feelings because it was a good company until the sell out to Expedia.  It wasn't just a good company, it was a fabulous company and so many of us were such happy little VR owners thinking we'd just go on for years and years running our little rentals as little Mom & Pop businesses.  Admittedly the VR industry was growing too large and unwieldy to carry on quite that way but that's another blog.

Garcia House opened its doors in January of 2010 and we're not closing up shop yet!!  We've just got to find a way to let people know our little enterprise is out there. 

Five days to make that final decision of whether to cut ties for our original studio VR or go to Pay-Per-Booking.  I've put in the new calendar here unassociated with VRBO/HomeAway and I know which way I'm leaning.