Disaster of a week staying in this place. Ever seen the John Candy movie “Summer Rental?” That was this place.
Booked for week of 4th of July. Drove all day to get there and got a call from the property management company literally 5 minutes before pulling onto the island to tell us “bad news, the air conditioning is broken and it will be a couple of days before it’s fixed.” They told us they’ve already looked for other places to put us but the entire island is booked solid. So it’s either turn around and go home and abandon our summer vacation plans or sweat it out for a couple of days in the brutal July heat. So we stayed. It was sweltering. Two days go by, no AC repair. The unit looked like it was way past needing replacing so not surprised it was broken. No word from the property management company. No apologies or even a peep from the owner. You see where this is going. The AC was never repaired. I wondered how long it had been broken. Did the renters the week before us experience the same thing? Neither the property management company nor the owner ever proactively reached out to us to check in or give us updates. We had to call them or go to their office and they never gave us a straight answer. They were very happy to take our money, but when we asked for a refund they refused because they said we had the option to leave as soon as we found out the AC was broken but we elected to stay....even though we were misled to believe it would be repaired “in a couple of days.”
We’ve gone to Emerald Isle for years and have always used a competing rental company for a house. The customer service experience was vastly different. AC went out one year and they brought us window units until it was fixed the next day. We got a call from the owner who apologized profusely. The owner checked in on us from time to time and the property management people bent over backwards for us. We’ve requested to speak to this owner of this place several times and he won’t respond to us, instead communicating through his poorly run property management company.
Advice to others looking at this property...keep looking. VRBO, please reconsider doing business with these people. It reflects poorly on you. I’ve used your service several times and this experience was a disaster compared to the others.