Our holiday is over and I would like to use this opportunity to give you feedback about our stay.
1. Arrrival
I contacted Patrick few days before arrival as well as on the road. Communication with him is very difficult as he don’t speak one word of English. I send him text in French, using google translator, about our arrival time. As I understood it was clear that our arrival time is 3pm. When we arrived, there was nobody in the house. I sent text to Patrick, didn’t get response. After I called him I thought he understand we have arrived. Finally he understood and he and madame who didn’t introduce herself arrived.
2. Welcoming
Patrick and madame showed us the villa, garden and the pool. Madame made very clear she don’t like dogs in the house ( we have 2 small dogs) even it was agreed we can take our dogs with us. Her behaviour was very arrogant and we were really surprised about it. But the most surprising thing was to come after checking the villa more closely. Self catering is self catering, but during more than 20 years of history of renting villas all over Europe we haven’t seen anything like this. Normally the owner leaves some basic thing for customers to use. Hand soap in every bathroom, 1 roll of toilet paper in every toilet, some dish washing liquid, few dishwasher tablet, some salt and other spices, some teabags and some coffee. Most of the owners also have some water in a fridge, ice cubes in a freezer, most of the time also bottle of wine and some regional products. But there was absolutely nothing available in this house. Not one of these listed things! I know these are not included in a contract. But these things almost never are. And still every owner have always had it. When you are in a hospitality business, you should be hospitable and think of your clients.
3. The Villa
Overall this villa is quite nice. On this price category you expect everything to be in good condition and everything was pretty much as shown on website photos. Anyway there were few problems: The larger bathroom downstairs have mould damage in humid conditions. You can easily smell it and the smell of mould spreads in to a bedroom.
A/C in upstairs bedroom didn’t work. First night was not pleasant as day was hot and leaving windows open is not an option because of mosquitos. I send message to Patrick in the morning after and they brought portable aircooler to help while waiting a serviceman. 2nd night was then sleeping in ok temperature but next to very loud aircooler. A/C was fixed the next day.
Living room sofa is the most cheapskate furniture I have ever seen anywhere before. Even the cheapest Ikea sofa beats it 100-0. On this price category, furniture like that is not acceptable. And to make it the more absurd, madame was very nervous about our dogs damaging her terrible sofa, before and after our stay! Also patio furniture is as cheapskate as it can be. Patio is nice but the cheapest possible bad quality plastic furniture makes it a joke. But the best to come: Madame did wrap dinner table chair seat with plastic film. The same you use for wrapping food. Very nice indeed to sit on those chairs when it is hot weather. And on top of this, she is using rubber sheets under cotton sheets on every bed! And again, it is hot weather there.
4. The Pool
Pool is quite small, but exactly the size that was promised. The quality of water was fine for 2 days. On day 3 it started to get cloudy. And on day 5 it was really bad. I contacted the owner and they came to check and clean the pool on Saturday. He told us to take shower before going to pool ( which we of course did every time. Not the first time we are using pool) And to wait 2 days before swimming so the weather quality is good again. We waited the whole week and it didn’t get any better. I am not a pool expert, but on my opinion they have not changed the water as often as needed. And water filtering system capacity is not enough for 9 people to swim several times a day with this hot weather. This pretty much ruined our holiday as playing in the pool with kids is always the highlight of the holiday.
5. The Garden
Garden is nice. Beautiful plants and flowers. Very well taking care of and it is beautiful to watch it from the patio.
6. House manual, Garden Plot
Does not exist. There is 2 printed pages of google translated text, mostly not understandable, but no manual.
On these printed pages they write that clients can pick up vegetables and eggs from garden plot.
This was also written on broker’s website. Very nice for small kids and they absolutely loved to have fresh eggs picked from hen house and fried for brekkie few minutes after that. It went well 1 week but after a week the owner went to garden plot and installed big locks everywhere blocking us to go there. No explanations why left us quite amazed.
We have enough of money to buy our eggs and veggies from supermarket, it was just nice thing for kids to do.
7. The View
Is very nice. Magalas villages seen from the patio over the beautiful garden is something we will always remember.
But- there is wastewater cleaning plant ( sewage farm) nearby the villa. When wind comes from that direction, it is not possible to eat or watch the view on a patio. This happened only during last 4 days in the end of week 2 as weather was changing more windy.
8. Neighbourhood
Not as calm and safe as you would think. We left our cars on the street for one night and both of them were scratched all over with a key. If you travel with dogs, it is good to know that there are dogs in every house on this neighbourhood and some of them are aggressive. Not everyone is keeping gates closed all time so be careful.
9. Departure checking
After getting to know little bit about madame already, we were waiting for problems with departure checking. During our stay we were as careful as we always are and didn’t break, damage or harm anything. We never do such things. We are also neat people, even we have 3 grandkids, we don’t make places dirty. But because of her, we cleaned everything very carefully before leaving the villa, even the end cleaning was included in the price.
And she didn’t let us down. We were watching the episode every CSI agent would have been jealous about. She was checking every small detail of the villa looking for any excuse to keep the deposit money. She told Patrick to charge us the cost of changing the pool water because we made it cloudy. Luckily Patrick is a normal person and didn’t start an argument with us about it. And finally madame gave up and we got our deposit back full. No thanks or welcome back words from her of course.
Summary:
We did save money for a year for this holiday. We invited our 2 daughters and their families and sponsored this holiday for them because we love them. We have been doing this for more than 20 years because we like self catering holidays. We have been renting villas in Scandinavian countries, Italy, Spain, France and Ireland. During our more than 20 years of experience of renting villas we have never faced anything like this. Experiences until now have been very positive and all owners have been asking us to come back.
Needless to say our expectations were very high concerning this holiday as we did choose price category where you can expect everything to be above our everyday life. It is very hard to understand what we did wrong. We are friendly and happy people, we make friends everywhere we go and we never behave bad. We are polite and because of communication problems with these owners, we learned them how to get application to translate spoken French to other languages so we can talk to each other and not to stand behind language wall.
Arrogant behaviour is never acceptable and when you get it from the person from whom you are buying accommodation services, it is rude. If madame is so nervous about people staying in the house, why are they then renting it out? If they are so worried about furniture, don’t want to spent money for pool cleaning, worried about giving few eggs and greens for free, then they should rethink about their business.
Now they are causing bad feelings for many people, during past two weeks for 9 person for example.
