After my intervention, a landlord has been blacklisted from the Holiday Lettings website.
Reader Charlotte Axton, from Derbyshire , was planning a pre-Christmas break in London, and found a flat on Holiday Lettings, close to Tower Bridge . She paid £359.80 through the site — but was later contacted by a company called MBD Apartments, which she assumed was the flat’s owner, asking for a deposit of £300.
She had suspicions, but the MBD website was simple and clear, and there were instructions about how and when the deposit would be refunded, so she paid up.
Charlotte enjoyed her London stay — the only damage caused was a broken glass, for which she left some money.
She followed MBD’s instructions, but, two months down the line, there was no sign of the deposit, despite several emails to MBD and calls to two numbers, which proved to be dead lines.
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Charlotte contacted Holiday Lettings , but it was unable to get things moving. She turned to me.
In most cases, owners list their properties on Holiday Lettings for free. In exchange, owners agree to let the company handle all payments — with the deposit normally taken at the same time as the rental payment, and returned 10 days after the stay. Thus MBD — which I tried to contact for this column — had no right to ask Charlotte for an extra £300. It was a clear breach of Holiday Lettings’ T&Cs.
When I spoke to the company, it said it did not normally get involved in deposit disputes, but in this case it has sent £300 to Charlotte as a gesture of goodwill, and has now removed MBD and its properties from the site.
Many listings sites now offer payment protection schemes. My advice: use them, and try to avoid giving money to property owners directly. Holiday Lettings’ scheme, for example, not only keeps your money safe, it lets you claim if the property has been misrepresented on the site, or if you are denied entry on arrival.
- An update on Judi Fourie’s story from last week. Air France lost her bag, then found it, but made her interrupt her holiday in South Africa to travel back to Cape Town airport to pick it up. The airline has now seen sense and reimbursed Judi for her additional travel costs.
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Send your holiday hassles to onyourside@sunday-times.co.uk or On Your Side, The Sunday Times, London SE1 9GF