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Beware of Con Artists Renting your Holiday Accommodation!

By Alan on Oct 16, 2011 in Featured, Weekly observations

This is the daily blog of Alan Davidson who lives in Whitby North Yorkshire. My main hobby is search engine optimisation. I live in Bradford and also Whitby. My Whitby Holiday Cottage http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ My CCTV and Security Alarm installation companyhttp://www.adalarms.co.uk/ I am Sir Roger Moore's Web manager, his official site http://www.roger-moore.com/ and at Sir Roger's forum you can ask the man himself a question each month http://www.roger-moore.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi Read more from this author

The following story is what actually happened to me and my holiday cottage in Whitby a couple of weeks back and if it helps anybody else from been cheated it was all been worthwhile writing.

I been letting my cottage in Whitby to holidaymakers for just over 3 ½ years now and to be perfectly honest I found the whole procedure a great success and an enjoyable business. Most things in life tend to be not quite as good as you are expecting, but I found this not to be the case with this business, with the cottage has been almost total all year round right from the very beginning of letting it.

We leave a guest book in the cottage where people can handwrite their comments and I can honestly say there have been hardly any complaints, or shall we say to put it more nicely constructive criticism. Most people really look after the cottage and there has been virtually no problems or damages. And so because of this and never bothered to take a returnable bond from people like some of the other letting companies do, I’ve more or less left the process free and easy.

Whitby Holiday Cottages Guest Book

So I was surprised when I was sat having a meal last Saturday when I received an e-mail on my mobile telephone, with a list of complaints about the condition of my cottage and how unsatisfactory it was.

In fact there were also around 15 photographs showing these so-called dissatisfactions. I am being totally honest when I said my initial reaction was this is absolutely rubbish, you cannot have had literally hundreds of people staying in the cottage over a three year period with almost virtually any complaints whatsoever and with most people really enjoying their stay and then suddenly have one guest with list of about ten complaints, even typed in red to emphasise the fact!

When I looked at the photographs there was four shots of our kitchen blind bracket which was at an angle due to the fact one screw was missing on one side, even though I later found it still actually worked and pulled down okay.

The next set of photographs was the Queen Size bed quilt, it had a large patch of some mysterious clear looking fluid on it and also a double sided rip of about 6 inches wide! We’ve been using the same cleaner for almost two years now and we’ve got to know her very well she does a very good job and would certainly never have used a quilt with this kind of exaggerated rip.

Now in the case with these particular to guests, on the day they arrived the Monday I actually met them because I had been staying in my cottage myself. This isn’t normally the case because usually one guess goes out as another comes in and they get their keys from the key safe. This means that I knew for certain that that kitchen blind was perfectly okay because I had been using it for three days myself.

Also on the day of their arrival I call back to the cottage after the cleaner had finished to inspect it and they arrived around midday whilst I was there, which was two hours earlier than their permitted entrance time of 2 PM. I just greeted them told them it was fine to enter early and gave them directions to the car park for which we provide a free parking permit.

So when I thought about it and analysed their complaints I knew for certain that they were a set of manufactured lies.

In actual fact they had book the cottage two weeks earlier, due to late last-minute unfortunate cancellation and right from the very first communications Pauline and myself and had our suspicions about the character of the person booking it. The reason is he was making it very confusing saying he wanted to book 2 nights with me and then ringing up my partner and saying it actually booked four nights and then moving off the subject trying to confuse the facts. Pauline and phoned me up in Whitby to tell me this and so immediately telephoned the man up to make it totally clear on the phone that if you wanted four nights holiday rather than two he could have them because the cottage was available. I also offered him £30 reduction on the tariff due to the confusion, which when I considered it afterwards was actually caused by him!

So the gentleman finished off his e-mail by threatening to report my cottage to Whitby Tourist Information board and various other organisations like Trip Adviser. He went on to say that he was in charge of 18 hotels and knew what good accommodation should be kept like and that they had stayed for one night only on the Monday and then they had left because of the condition of the cottage to stay in a hotel. He offered to pay for one night only in wanted his money back to the other three nights when he supposedly had not stayed.

As soon as I contacted the cleaner she told me that on the following Friday, four days later she had arrived at the cottage one hour early than their official departure time which is 10 AM, just in case the people have left early and she immediately saw them still occupying the cottage with all their possessions still inside and so went to give them time to leave.

I then went on to contact the neighbours who confirmed that they had seen the couple coming and going during the week, is a particular Whitby yard you have to pass the first cottage in the cul-de-sac to get to mine. One of the neighbours had even seen the man loading up is On Friday morning, and said to him “I hope you had a nice time”? to which do man replied rather shift away “Yes but we haven’t stayed in the cottage” the neighbourhood immediately thought how strange I’ve seen them coming and going all week long!

I immediately sent the man an e-mail to tell them I would certainly not be refund in any money whatsoever and I would be going down to the cottage the following day to get a backup copy of my CCTV footage which is recorded on a digital video recorder in the attic, which is stamped with the time and date recording.

I also pointed out that if there had been any truth about not being satisfied with the accommodation, they should have contacted me immediately, especially if they intended to leave early, because the cottage could have been occupied by somebody else.

So what we have here is a pair of con artists who basically book themselves into some privately owned accommodation and then send a barrage of complaints and threats in an attempt to get most of their money back and have virtually free holiday.

The sad thing is that if people were not so confident about the condition of their accommodation, or they were new to this particular business, or just people who could be intimidated easily, I’m sure they would have refund of the money and the con artist would have got away with the scam.

Also when you look practically at Whitby some of the holiday cottages are located in isolated spots where there would be no neighbours to see whether the people have been actually occupying the accommodation. So it would be far more difficult to prove if the people that actually stayed in the accommodation.

I think it’s probably a little extreme that people in Whitby start going to the effort of having a CCTV camera and recorder fitted, because actually crime in this area is very well in comparison to Bradford where my CCTV and security alarm installation business is based.

When I first bought the cottage I had a large letting company from Scarborough come to view the property and he told me that he had over 100 cottages on its books in the area and none of them had a security alarm and CCTV and it wasn’t necessary, but in my case it did become useful a few years later!

I think they should apply for a job on TV presenting The Real Hustle!

www.adalarms.co.uk Est 1984 Specialists in Wireless Alarms and CCTV

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Alan Davidson

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