My friends and I are currently in the process of planning a trip to New York for next year. While looking for accommodation, we found HouseTrip.com, a website that enables you to rent houses, apartments, etc all over the world.
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?
