Holidays from Hell

[Lincolnite]

Any advice appreciated...we are currently holidaying in France (air B&B). When we arrived on Saturday we noticed there looked to be a construction of new housing going on behind the villa. Our villa has a pool which is the soul reason we booked and looked forward to spending our week outside. Low and behold, on Monday morning, work started at 9am. This went on until 5pm yesterday, the same happened today. Diggers, petrol cement mixer, angle grinder you name it! Needless to say, we are livid. Have contacted the owner who claims she had no idea about the construction site and there was certainly no mention of this on the listing. She has offered us £150 euro refund which equates to less than half a nights stay, laughable. Do we have a case for compensation here as the air B&B website really isn't clear on this atall. Many thanks for reading.

I doubt it, could you check with the company if their info is unclear ?
If she really didn't know, she wouldn't have offered any compo.

Unfortunately I don't think you have a case for compensation as you haven't been miss sold . The construction work is outside the control of the owner.

You could try Airbnb, or threaten a bad (true) review but otherwise I think you need to make the best of it, go out during the day and use the pool in the evening.

The owner must have known this building work was going on, the foundations are in! This has clearly been going on for many weeks if not months and there is new housing surrounding the area which means there was a risk of noise. Surely there was a duty to mention this? None of this was visible on street view or Google earth.

Does it mention "quiet" or "peaceful" in the listing?

V expensive place! We're paying 1/4 that in France (3 bed house) - no pool mind.

Yes it clearly states quiet environment. It is in the region of La Rochelle so I believe prices are much higher.

Def go through the App to log official complaint then.

Totally irrelevant: location, decor, property condition and amenities are such important variables. You could be in a dump in the middle of nowhere!!! Pointless comment.

Does it mean you can't use the pool (ie out of action) or that the pool is working and available but noisy?

I feel for you. That would ruin my holiday & it’s not cheap. I’d put an official complaint in & see what happens.

We can use the pool but the building site is the other side of the fence line meaning it is impossible to relax.

I know it is not ideal but is there any way you can make the most of it such as putting in blue tooth earphones to try and mask the noise or is it too intrusive? It must be so upsetting for you I hope that you are able to getsome kind of resolution. Is the setting covered in the terms and conditions, do they make representations around this in the description that you are entitled to rely on? Please be sure to take videos with audio to supply as evidence.

I don’t know whether this is the same for the area you are in, but in Touraine and Anjou, you have to have a permis de construire, which is displayed outside the works while they are going on. It is an A3 sort of size, usually white with black marker. It will have the date granted and the date begun, it should also have the reference number which is issued by the Marie and which you can look up , either in person ( some towns online on the Marie website).

if thé date is before your arrival ( which it obviously is) it will prove that the owner must have been aware and so was acting in bad faith.

We had something similar last year. 7.45am they started angle grinding, digging etc. My 3 year old was still asleep and I was 6 months pregnant, had this for 2/3 days, we were livid.

We recorded the noise on our phones and sent it to the host. They refunded us £200. We had paid £900 for the week for context. Luckily we were out all day and they had stopped by the time we got home each day. Bit of your planning on chilling in the villa what she had offered you is a joke x