Holiday cottage - right to feel annoyed

[Liciaflorrick]

We like lots of people have not had a holiday for 3 years. Booked a holiday cottage (through big company). Am disappointed but am not sure if I need to simply get a grip over the following. We haven’t done a cottage holiday before but even though it was £2000 for a week it was actually cheaper than our normal Haven type holiday (school hols, decent lodge etc)

• arrived and key box instructions not correct (wrong key code) meaning out of hours call to holiday company to sort- took half an hour to fix with hungry kids etc


• House was reasonably clean but not spotless, crumbs underneath sofa and dust in corners, chopping boards with crumbs on, cutlery drawer dirty. I am not a clean freak so for me to notice must in the words of my teen mean it’s quite bad.


• one toilet out of three not working (but town house so means where floor with kids bedrooms don’t have a working toilet. To be fair cottage company tried to sort this but couldn’t and it will have to wait until changeover.


• Clothes left in a drawer with unmarked tablets in one of the children bedroom’s drawers

I don’t know if it is reasonable to be irritated about these small things but have never had the dirt issue etc with other holidays mainly mobile homes etc) . I do feel let down, that having spent £2k (saved hard all year) that it isn’t perfect. Is this simply not possible within this budget?

I couldn’t get too worked up about it tbh, seems fairly minor. They’ll probably give you a voucher toward next one. Forget it and have a great holiday!

Very very poor service indeed. You are entitled to a refund and I think you need to complain and request a proportion of that fee back!

I worked for a business that had a small hotel. When you're registered as a business you have to pay for a commercial service to collect the rubbish and recycling. Fine as we were there to put bins out and ckean them You don't want guests to arrive to dirty bins and recycling so it's difficult if you're employing a cleaner. That might be behind the bin situation

Our 2 week trip to Greece with flights, transfers and 2 bed apt cost £2,100. In school holidays. You should be getting a lot more for your money. At least a clean, Crumb free cottage! And all loos working

Such is the demand for holiday cottages that I fear companies/owners have let standards slip badly. When nobody can afford a holiday any more then perhaps they'll raise their game!

They have 6 hours to clean, and bearing in mind that the average 3 bedroom place during school holidays stsrts at £1500, the £120 for a cleaner for 6 hours isn't really out of the way.

Always makes me laugh when people come out with stuff like this. Most cleaners do several houses in that six hours. We do. We have as many houses as we can manage all together in one day and we can’t take on any more than that. There are three of us and we just about manage. That said, we’d never leave a house in the state the Op has described, that’s bad. We do take a bit of pride in our work. We’ve never had any complaints like that.

I would 100% expect it to be clean no matter how much I paid. FGS we are trying to get out of a pandemic. Complain demand money back esp with one toilet out of use.

I've just got back from a cottage holiday, second time there and it was not as good as 2 years ago. Shower door didn't close properly, my DD flooded the shower room- took me hours and all the towels to mop it up. Then I had to wash and dry them all so we had towels! Massive (3') tall thistle plant on the patio that jumped up and scratched me. But it was clean, so it was no big deal.

I just couldn’t bring myself to spend that much money on accommodation for one week in the U.K. Nearly £300 a night! It would have to be a palace for me to fork out that much, and I’d refuse to leave the place for the entire time so that I got my moneys worth.

Yanbu, for a start it's not difficult to get key code correct. Bare minimum I would say.
Forget the price, if someone is renting out a cottage for £50 or £2000 I would expect it to be clean. Again, minimum standard. Things that should bump price up are expensive furnishings etc, not cleanliness.
I've had this many times, my son has severe food allergies and we have had dirty fridges, microwaves and cutlery draws. I have always taken pictures and complained, always with some sort of discount though probably not enough for the hassle.
One owner cheekily said ' well no one has ever complained before' to which I replied 'I don't care somebody (me) is now!!' She soon shut up and listened. Good luck .

Fair enough to feel a bit miffed. But focus on what can be done to rectify the situation NOW.

Make sure you give the company all the details immediately. Tell them what you'd like to happen to make it better now (e.g. get toilet fixed now, send in a cleaner straight away etc) or move you to another cottage (ok unlikely!).

Only, and only if they have been given every opportunity to make things better and failed then ask what else they can offer. Perhaps a reduced return visit. Money off another stay etc.

Asking for a refund is CF cheeky unless they are seriously at fault.

We have often done the holiday cottage thing (probably with the same company) and I would be very annoyed. You should have been told about things like the broken toilet in advance. It's also not unreasonable to expect the place to be clean. As I said we have stayed in holiday cottages many times and they have always been cleaned before our arrival.

Same....and ours is certainly not 2K a week!

We’ve just come home from a week in a cottage in Alnwick…spotless, smelled fresh & clean, bathroom/kitchen were immaculate.
We left it the same 😊

That has definitely not been cleaned properly, if at all! Accommodation cleaners are said to be giving cleaners longer at the moment to clean and do changeovers due to Covid measures. So "deeper cleans" (which yours has certainly not had, I mean how can crumbs and items in drawers get missed?!) And also, typically, new holiday makers are not allowed to take up their residence until around 5pm rather than 2pm in order for them to do deeper cleans, as well as having to be out by 9am rather than 10am when they depart typically. Take plenty of photos for your evidence and make sure the company sends someone to look sooner rather than later. They should probably do you a better clean while you are there/out or give you a partial refund. Good luck!

YANBU. We are currently in a 3 bed log cabin in a popular part of the country, with a pool shared with one other cabin, for £1000 and it’s spotless. Couple minor gripes but can’t fault the cleaning. £1k still feels like a heck of a lot though, most we’ve ever paid for a week in the U.K.

for £2k I’d want a jacuzzi and champagne on ice, and spotlessly clean!

That’s terrible…and I would absolutely leave a review. The tablets unforgivable! We let out our home in France and when I did the handover the place was pristine…right down to a folded V on the loo paper. However…we arranged for a company to do handovers for us and I had a few complaints about the place not up to scratch. So I got a friend to spend a week there and send photo’s and a report….the apartment was dirty on arrival with a ring of dirt around the bath tub….we were paying £200 a handover! We sacked them and found a decent company to take over….complain…the owners may not realise…take photo’s and they should refund some of your money.

Don't you think you deserve to get what you paid for? I presume the OP wanted 3 working toilets for a reason- to save going up or down more than one storey eg in the middle of the night. Yes, shit happens, but you shouldn't have to put up with it or pay for it

Well shit happens at your home but you’re not asking someone to pay £2000 for staying in it for a week. I’m not a very tidy person but part of the pleasure of going away for me is the cleanliness and order. Those responsible for the rental have failed on the requirements of the handover. On the basis of the tablets left on top of all I would ask for a full refund. If this not given I would leave full description of this on review sites. Probably did similar posts by others!

I'm reading so many of these threads, particularly about UK cottage holidays, usually booked through one of the big cottage companies.
They don’t seem to care, they get their money and and that’s all they are interested in.

I had a similar experience before the pandemic and now refuse to do UK self catering holidays, it feels like too much of a gamble.

This exactly we spent a fortune to have hairy bedding, fag butts around an overgrown garden that u couldn’t sit and enjoy the table in as completely overgrown with rusty random stuff dumped and used as ashtrays. This was before Covid and worst of all the flimsy front door had a crack in the glass and one very flimsy lock. The owner had 3 listings in this popular tourist place and the photos of the garden that sold it to us must have been very out of date. Contacted company at the time of stay with date stamped photos and literally no action was taken. We went back to same place different accommodation the door still had crack in the glass so it wasn’t even fixed a year later 🤷🏻‍♀️Oh and the explanation was to do with cleaning company.

You are not being unreasonable. We hired a holiday place in France a few years ago - it belonged to an English couple and was obviously their second home. Most of the kitchen cupboards had food in (there was one left for us to use), there were clothes in the drawers in the bedrooms and the hanging space for our clothes had thick dusty cobwebs. The tv in the main lounge didn’t work, so 6 of us had to take turns using the tv in a tiny room with a 2 seater sofa. There was a book of strict rules which included moans about previous guests. The place was lived in dirty and worst of all the bedroom my dad used had thick black dog hairs all over the carpet. We complained to the company on our return, and got a reply from the owners son basically telling us we were ungrateful. We hadn’t said anything whilst there as we didn’t want to lose our deposit. And it was in Brittany and the weather was shite.

£2k is sadly not unusual this year at a popular holiday resort in the U.K. I do think places are less busy.

Pity so many posters mention how cheap it is to go abroad with no acknowledgement of the environmental irreversible impact of flying 🙄

We stayed in a cottage in Wales, where the sofa and cushions were covered in dog hair, I vacuumed and washed the covers on arrival.

There was no television reception, and we had my mum with us who is an avid TV watcher, and lover of Soaps

The bathroom tiles were horrific, and smelt. Old dirty quarry tiles, that no amount of cleaning helped, and I used all the cleaners as we had small children, so had to cover the whole floor in towels.

Every town or large shop we went in I looked for a new toilet seat to fit, as the house one was old worn, wooden and nasty ( never found one )

.My emailed complaints were completely ignored, and never replied to by the company..

You are not being unreasonable.

We also stayed in a luxury log cabin in Scotland once, cheap dirty broken down hovel, next to the lake, attached to a caravan park, which had not been mentioned at all, with death trap old wooden cots for the children, a toilet with no lock, and no sign of any luxury anywhere.

It was absolute false advertising.

mine neither @nocciola . £1500 a week in high season (that's just 8 weeks worth) and it sleeps six people in spacious comfort with a massive garden. One set of visitors last year ( who left an atrocious mess of filth and overflowing bin bags through the property) merrily told me it was better value than a static caravan at a nearby leisure park. Which has made me re-assess things somewhat!
But I've been on the other end of cottages not up to scratch - most memorably on the Isles of Scilly where we didn't want to put our bare feet on the carpet, it was so filthy!

Yes, flying is bad but the alternative for us is to not go on holiday. I can't afford to spend a week in the UK at a hotel or an apartment because not only is the accommodation expensive but you also have expensive attractions and meals on top of that.

My original post (at least) was made not to suggest 'just go abroad because it's cheaper' but to lament the fact that a lot of people can't afford UK breaks that are comparable. I wish that was the case as my husband's mum was from Cornwall and we'd love to go and visit the places she grew up.

I try and mitigate environmental impact as much as I can at home. My son uses reusable nappies, we have recycled toilet paper, eco cleaning products, no plastic bags etc.

So yeah, flying sucks, but until UK holidays are more reasonably priced it's flying to Europe or no holiday for my family :(

Our holiday area is quieter this year.
There's obv pent up demand for foreign holidays. But I think some of the profiteering that took place last Year among holiday let's has contributed. Added to that many don't seem to have used the breathing g space they got in 2020 to do deep cleans and improvements.