We had an extremely negative experience with Elena den Dooven, the house owner. While our initial interactions with Elena were pleasant, we feel she acted in bad faith once we had a problem due to a covid crisis in our family. First our grandson came down with covid and then our adult son came down with covid and was very sick for more than a week. We had been planning for a long family weekend with the grandchildren in the Berkshires but covid was now preventing that.
When the covid crisis hit our family, we immediately wrote to Elena, as the VRBO website suggested, and asked about our options. We then wrote the next day to inquire about cancellation or rescheduling. We were still within the cancellation period and thought Elena would be agreeable to allowing us to reschedule (which would have enabled her to keep the full rental payment). We did not hear back from Elena until the following morning, just after the cancellation period expired. We would have been satisfied with merely rescheduling the family trip, but Elena wrote to us informing us that covid has a 5 day quarantine period (which was wrong in this case) and she suggested that she did not believe us. Elena remained inflexible, she wanted her money and would not permit us to reschedule; she also mentioned bringing a lawyer in to discuss.
The VRBO policy states that “hosts determine the cancellation and refund policies” and that “if you want to make changes outside the cancellation policy window, contact the host”. We were within the cancellation policy window when we reached out to her and we were hopeful we could work things out with her.
This covid crisis in our family, understandably, was completely unexpected and we feel that she acted in bad faith, letting the clock run on the cancellation period and then not giving us any flexibility. As a result, we lost 100% of the rental fee (which was quite expensive being over $2,000) with no option to reschedule. Please be aware of this. It is not what we expected of VRBO hosts with such a high rating. We will never work with her again as she has not shown either good faith or compassion, only greed.