First the good: the house is absolutely adorable—just as described, well stocked with lots of extras, the property itself is big and beautiful, the front porch is a dream, the beds are comfortable, and it was very clean. The playhouse is cute but my kids didn’t play in it as it looked very buggy and dusty and spidery and hadn’t been swept out or cleaned in a while. Fortunately there were lots of toys inside and my kids also really enjoyed playing in the field and on the porch.
The negative is that there was no flexibility whatsoever with the cancellation policy. Part of my family got Covid and I called one week prior to our arrival to see if they would be willing to re-list the property. I explained that I understood that if it didn’t rent we’d be on the hook for the full four nights we’d rented it, but asked if they would consider trying to rent it to someone else for any or all of the nights we had reserved so that we could get at least a portion of our money back. I was told no exceptions. I found this very frustrating as I know that Fourth of July is a big travel weekend and they could have likely rented it for at least some of the four nights, charged us a cancellation fee, and made even more money. Furthermore if it didn’t rent then we’d be on the hook for the full amount—so it was no risk to them. Basically they were well within their rights to say no to us (as they did) but the rental agency had the opportunity to potentially help a family and earn loyalty from us and they chose not to even try. Ultimately as this was a sizeable portion of our summer vacation budget we will not be able to come another weekend this summer and it was disappointing to be able to only come as a partial family group knowing that almost any other weekend we could have come as our full group. For this reason in the future we will not rent here again, given the reality of Covid and being a larger family with small children, I will seek out rental homes with better cancellation policies. (Yes I realize many families would have still all come but we were not comfortable exposing our children to the sick family members as we have tried to be responsible and always follow strict cdc policies and minimize community spread.)