We booked this place for a long weekend over the Christmas break, for a family ski getaway.
On entering the house, I noticed a musty odor, but it had been wet and raining when we checked in, so we let it go. Then my husband sits down on the couch and notices some “gritty stuff”. We thought “maybe the last guests left some crumbs that were missed”. So we actually found a vacuum in the closet and cleaned it. Also within the first few minutes, I noticed a fly inside the window. Got it, no problem. Then noticed a few more along the windowsill.
Not the best start, but we weren’t going to let these little things spoil our trip. So we went to the supermarket, picked up some food and firewood for the beautiful fireplace. No fireplace tools. A call to Vacasa, the management company, (which is in Oregon, not Vermont), and the very nice lady said we should just use another piece of wood to poke the fire. Um, OK. So we improvised and made the most of it.
But it gets worse. On closer inspection, we noticed stains on a lot of the furniture. And black spots on the floor, which turned out to be burn marks and dead flies. There were actually dead flies on every windowsill, and throughout the house. When it came time to get the kids ready for bed, more flies upstairs. I got one, then another, and another, and before I knew it I had killed a dozen flies. Then we noticed a spot in the corner of the ceiling that looked like black mold in the master bedroom. In the main floor bedrooms. there were mouse droppings on the beds and nightstand. We actually found a mouse hole chewed into the box spring of one of the beds!
Another call to Vacasa first thing in the morning with all of our grievances. They promised to contact the local property manager and see if we could be relocated. We already paid for lift tickets so I explained we could not wait around and gave them permission to enter the house while we were out. I made another call to follow up midday. They said they were still waiting on the property manager. When we returned to the house that evening, it was clear that no one had been there. I made another call and told them we were leaving. I then spent the next several days on the phone trying to get someone to actually help us instead of pushing us off to someone else. Eventually we got our money back, but not how I wanted to spend my vacation. Worst experience ever.