Sounds great, right?
We thought so. We looked at our options and picked out a choice of three, which met our budget and location needs.
Soon enough, the requests for availability came back and we were set to book.
That is, until I decided to have a look for reviews of HouseTrip.com, my quick google search didn't yield much apart from a bunch of TripAdvisor links.
I'm not the biggest fan of TripAdvisor, while they are a good source of knowledge, a lot of the time you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to the answers you want. Most things have a negative slant on them. Which is a shame, because I know from experience that some places that have bad reviews on there, don't deserve them - the reviews having been left by grumpy customers who feel the need to have some kind of revenge.
As I said though, the Google search didn't return a whole lot, so I started to trawl through TripAdvisor and see what was being said about the site we were about to drop a bunch of money on for our New York trip.
As predicted, things started off negatively. However, there wasn't any let up, negative post after negative post kept appearing and then, after all the negativity, the word "illegal" appeared.
Illegal? How could a site as big as HouseTrip.com be illegal? It's being advertised all over the place. On my computer and my TV.
A law came into effect last May, which made apartment renting in New York City, for less than 30 days, illegal. The thread on TripAdvisor linked to this post on the Wall Street Journal website: Illegal Hotels in New York City Will Be Policed by Mayor's Office - Metropolis - WSJ
Upon learning this, I messaged the appartment owner on HouseTrip.com to question them, on whether or not what they were doing was legal. Maybe they had a way around the law? I also sent a message to HouseTrip.com's customer support team, asking them the same basic question. Was it illegal? Did they have a way to make it legal?
That was the response I received. (I actually sent the same email to HouseTrip.com twice, thinking the first had been deleted. I received two emails. Both with exactly the same response, the only difference being "Hello," instead of "Dear" and the name of the "Customer Care Assistant".)Dear Martin,Thank you for contacting us at HouseTrip.com.To answer your enquiry, our website serves as a platform connecting registered users wishing to offer their rental space to potential guests looking for rental accommodation.According to our Terms of Use, hosts and the properties they rent should comply with any applicable local law requirements for short term stays.Local laws on rental accommodation in New York City are complex and are currently under review by the local legislature. It is the owner’s responsibility to be aware of such local laws and to stay compliant. HouseTrip cannot and does not check every property listed on the website but will investigate any specific report on non-compliance.Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions, or there’s anything else I can do to assist.Best regardsSarah StotzCustomer Care Assistant
For me, that email can be summed up as "Not our problem, Lolz" - which is why we won't be using HouseTrip.com any time soon.
Oh, and I've yet to receive an reply from the appartment owner. That seems legit.
Today, HouseTrip.com emailed asking me to review their support, starting with "Good, I'm satisified" or "Bad, I'm unsatisfied."
I clicked "Good, I'm satisfied" and it then allowed me to add a comment.
I appreciated the quick response and particularly appreciated the quality of the copy and paste work involved. It answered all my questions and confirmed that I won't be using HouseTrip on this occasion.I doubt anyone will read or reply to the comment I supplied, but oh well.
In short, I don't trust HouseTrip.com and doubt I'll ever use their services in the future.
Amen to that!
ReplyDeleteHouseTrip.com has shown itself to be unresponsive, duplicitous and dishonest. I cannot recommend strongly enough that people avoid them. It appears that they survive by out-advertising the many reputable web sites that perform a similar function. Here’s my story.
My wife and I submitted our booking on July 23 at 5:25 AM. According to the terms and conditions posted on the HouseTrip.com website, hosts have up to 36 hours to respond. We therefore wrote back at 8:30 AM on July 25 – more than 50 hours after we submitted the booking – to ask that our request be formally cancelled. “Magically,” we then received a back-dated notice stating that our booking was accepted on July 24. While it is theoretically possible that the e-mail was “stuck” in web somewhere for a day, the header information indicates that it was transmitted on July 25 rather than on July 24. In other words, it looks like HouseTrip.com faked a back-dated reply in order to justify charging our credit card. That was the first strike against them, but I was (stupidly) willing to continue.
We next tried to contact the hosts, who did not respond. After waiting for three days for the hosts to respond to multiple messages sent both directly and via the HouseTrip.com website, we asked HouseTrip.com’s customer support for help. Finally, on July 29 – five days after they had supposedly accepted our booking – the hosts replied with an obviously bogus message claiming to be a repeat of one they sent earlier. I say “obviously bogus” because there was no indication that the new message had been forwarded. Instead, it was a newly created message. (It appears that HouseTrip.com assumes that no user knows how to read header information in e-mails.)
On August 1, I learned via a review page that while the 5th floor apartment in question does indeed have an elevator as advertised, the elevator does not work. The apartment is therefore, in effect, a 5th floor walk-up with 100 steps to reach the unit. The hosts verified this in response to an SMS query from me on August 2 but have since refused to respond to any messages from me – SMS, direct e-mail or via HouseTrip.com. Frustrated with my inability to receive a response, I once again contacted HouseTrip.com’s customer support on August 5. They also did not reply so I sent yet another message on August 7. I’m still waiting for a reply.
Now we are completely stuck. HouseTrip.com already charged our credit card for the entire cost of the rental and refuses to even reply to message from us. The rental is a 5th floor walkup, not an elevator-serviced apartment as advertised, and is therefore completely unusable to me.
My conclusion: HouseTrip.com is completely unreliable and unscrupulous. Cheap tricks such as back-dated messages and obvious bogus “repeats” of past messages show just how dishonest they are. Based on my experience, I would say that attempting to do business with HouseTrip.com is about like sending your credit card data off to one of those infamous “Nigerian prices.” Stay away; stay far away.