Has anyone used www.homelidays.com
 

Hi,
I have found an apartment to rent off homelidays.com and wondered if anyone could help me out on figuring if it's legit or not. I've emailed back and forth with the owner a few times and she has sent me more pics of the place. I've never used this site, but it seems like it's a pretty secure place to find an apartment and the owner seems nice. Any help would be wonderful.
The link to the apartment we found is:
http://www.homelidays.com/milano/apa...t146757en1.htm

Homelidays is a listing site and does not personally screen the putative owners. Someone reported a fraud some months ago, but most reports have been very positive. You just have to do due diligence on the owner yourself.

I have used quite successfully several times and would be guided by the responsiveness of the owner. You could check if there are any reviews of the apartment on www.slowtrav.com

We worked with an owner from Homelidays for our apartment. She was great. No problems here. But WillTravel is right. Yez pays your money and yez takes yer chances!

Homelidays is very similar to VRBO where you deal directly w/ the individual owners. One fodorite posted last year about paying for a non-existant apartment. Maybe so, maybe not - but the details were pretty odd -- payment procedures etc. -- and the poster didn't seem to have answers to many of our questions.

W/ Homelidays the first contact is through the website and after they hook you up w/ the owner you communicate directly w/ him/her.

I've had very good luck using them for flats in Paris.

No more danger IMHO that using VRBO or even a full service agency. But it is up to you whether you can deal w/ any level of unease.

darn - didn't mean to click post . . .

The problem I see w/ that flat is there are NO pictures except for a sliver of the bathroom. It is large enough and the price is certainly cheap. I don't know Milan at all well to know if the location is OK.

I personally would ask the owner to send me some photos of the apartment, and the exterior of the bldg . . . .

I have used the website once for an apartment in Rome with very good results.

I am currently in the midst of booking a country house in France for next spring.

I ask a lot of questions prior to signing contracts, but sometimes you just have to go with your gut feeling. I had such a positive experience the first time that I am not hesitating using homelidays again.

Happy travels!

I've used homelidays.com several times and the places have varied from nice enough to absolutely lovely - but I've only rented places that have testimonials and have mostly rented places that had raves for testimonials.

I agree with janisj on this one - why is there only one photo & it's of the bathroom?

Thanks for all your info! I have spoken with the owner back and forth and she has sent me more photos via email. Her and her husband just recently bought the apartment and were having it renovated, thus the lack of pictures on the site. She seemed nice enough over the phone and I didn't get a bad vibe so we are hoping to book her apartment this Sept. Thanks again for all the input. It really does help.

I used it in Bretagne for a lovely little stone cottage and recommended it to a friend who recently used it in Juan-les-Pins. Both of us had such wonderful experiences (our landlord GAVE my husband and me their bicycles for no extra cost and my friend's landlord asked them what they would like at the supermarché every day), that we would definitely use it again.

It is just as legit as any of the other "by owner" sites - more popular with Europeans though.

I used to advertise with them, but stopped becasaue I was getting SO much spam and fruadulent/SCAM booking requests from phoney guests (just to give ya the flip side!) - took too much time to sort out the "real" people from all the fake scam artists!

That's quite true - there are probably many more scams relating to bad-faith alleged guests than there are to bad-fath alleged owners.

p.s. just tried to check out the link...but I get this: "advertisement is not currently online" - which means NOTHING in Homeliday terms...if you update your listing at all (even just your bookable dates), they take up to 24hours to get the listing back up - just wanted to let you know so you don't freak out that it's suddenly not there :-)