We are considering renting an apartment in Paris for our family next summer, and though I have not begun my research, I think I'll stay away from Paris Attitude...aptly named it appears!

There is nothing wrong with ParisAttitude that I can see. It should be recognized, however, that it is merely a tool for individual owners to list their apartments.

jbf1, I feel certain that if you read the website and/or the information in your correspondance with Paris Attitude, you would see that such questions should be directed to the owners of the apartment, not with Paris Attitude. Haven't they provided you with an address of the owners for such questions? If you still fail to get answers from the owners, then yes, I'd avoid that apartment. But an individual owner failing to respond has little to do with Paris Attitude itself. It operates much like VRBO.

In fact I'm sort of surprised that ParisAttitude did so much for Micheline when an individual owner failed to respond, but I think it speaks well of them that they did!

But with VRBO you don't pay a substantial agency fee so they should help. In my case the rental was 650 euros and 150 of that was the agency fee.

exactly, that is the way I feel, also. I either rent from an agency and expect them to do something, or if I rented from an owner directly and had all those problems, I would just use VRBO or something, and avoid a large agency fee. I know VRBO charges something for advertising, of course, but I don't think its 25-33 pct of the rental like some of these websites that don't do anything (NY Habitat is another of those).