I am an owner of a property in France and have listed successfully on Owners Direct since 2013 when it worked very well as a referral portal connecting owners and renters looking for a holiday home. In recent times, I have to report exactly the same negative experiences as other owners using Owners Direct since its takeover by HomeAway/Expedia. More positively, I have found it is easy to find much better options to advertise my house successfully and have listed with other specialist French rental sites offering a truly direct model – see later in this review. Firstly my recent time consuming and negative experiences with OD:

Referrals from OD had totally crashed over the last 6-8 months prior to Jan 2018 – a fact not noticed by me earlier as I had many returning bookings where guests came to me direct. In fact when it came to renew in January 2018, I realised I had no bookings from OD for the season apart from repeat stays.

I felt I had to agree to online bookings in order to avoid the additional surcharge making my listing ridiculously expensive. The help sections on online payments were misleading to put it mildly describing two options for receiving payments: either after check-in (who on earth would opt for that I thought?) or the “advanced payments system” which offered transfer of payments within a few days of the reservation being confirmed. When I received my first booking request and accepted it a couple of days ago, I discovered that all rental payments would only be transferred to me six months later and as they estimate a delay of 5-7 days could well not be in my bank account until after the renters left.

In a phone call yesterday OD informed me the ‘advance payments system’ did not yet exist and was currently ‘in development’. OD had also charged the customer £111 in addition to my rental for their ‘service fee’. The representative I spoke to at OD could give me not one single reason for retaining my rental fee for what would effectively be 6 months, nor could they explain what the ‘service fee’ covered apart from protection against non-returned security deposits (which I do not charge).

After this discussion, I decided that I did not wish to be associated in any form with Owners Direct in future, but find that (not surprisingly) I cannot cancel my listing and receive a refund. I also found my listing was set to renew automatically and I could not delete my credit card as it was “in use”. I have reset my account to not allow automatic renewal and will follow up getting my card details taken off the site asap.

As a result of this decision I cancelled the booking I had accepted (requesting a full refund) and wrote to the customer to apologise and explain my decision. As far as the listing is concerned the only thing I can do is ‘hide’ it so that I am effectively not advertising on the site until renewal when I will discontinue my subscription. I do not want to attract bookings with additional charges for the customer and delayed payment terms for me and so continuing to advertise on OD would be acting under false pretences. All of this is so unnecessary – there is a customer out there who wants to stay at my house for a week when it is vacant and under the old system of direct communication this would have been achieved with minimum fuss and lower expense for the holiday maker.

Since January when we had no bookings from Owners Direct I have listed my property on two specialist websites – French Connections and Holiday France Direct. I now have fully booked the house from end of June through to the end of August this year plus an advanced booking for 2019 – all from these two sites both of which allow direct communication with the renter. Holiday France Direct levies a small booking fee of £34 on the renter which I then refund so this is effectively a pay per booking site, French Connections charges an annual listing fee and no other charges. I have also listed with Chez Nous but have had only one referral which did not convert to a booking. There are many other options out there now (many openly comparing themselves with the OD offer) which I shall look at before renewing listings again in January 2019. Nearly all these sites are based on the direct advertising and renewal service and no add-on charges which used to be the successful model for Owners Direct. One thing I do plan to do is contact owners advertising on sites and get their experiences before booking or renewing a listing.

My purpose in posting this review now is to add to the voices calling for Owners Direct to move away from its current model which creates such levels of dissatisfaction. As I don’t expect the corporate Expedia giant will be able to do that any time soon, I add my experience of the advertising rental options beyond OD for other owners looking to find a replacement.

My message is – cast off the Owners Direct chains – there are much, much better options out there for owners looking to rent their properties and for holiday makers wanting to book direct. It seems to me that Owners Direct really has lost the plot!

Over the last year or so we have watched this website with disbelief as this company seems to pursue its self-destructive policies. As property owners there’s not much we can add to the justified complaints of many others about OD, especially as far as owners are concerned. So, in quick summary:

1) OD blocked us from contacting prospective clients direct, both for their and our benefit, prior to accepting bookings – i.e. we were forced to accept complete unknowns into our cottage. Sorry, that’s not how we have successfully operated for the last 10 years.
2) OD arbitrarily imposed their absurd booking fee, supposedly guaranteeing clients’ interests. Toffee. How could they guarantee something that we provide? (I know, I can hear their corporate America-speak blathering answer coming at me right now). Anyway, bookings by credit card are protected anyway.
3) OD try to take clients’ payments in advance and then sit on it until the time of the letting. Nice one, OD. Do you think we are mugs?
4) Arbitrarily OD changed our payment arrangements to ‘automatic renewal’ AND put our previously-used credit card details against it. Sneaky. On top of that, OD wouldn’t allow us to change the payment arrangement without supplying details for another card. Not trusting them as far as I can kick an elephant, we put a block on OD as payees with our credit card supplier. Folks, bear this in mind.
5) OD insisted on us accepting bookings within 48 hours or they were rejected. We were engaged in dialogue with seriously interested clients from Australia, sorting out their sensible enquiries and agreeing non-standard dates for their benefit – but because 48 hours expired OD sent a notice to them saying the booking enquiry hadn’t been accepted. Oh bl**dy great. And because OD strive every which way they can to stop you providing your contact details, we couldn’t contact the client again lost the booking.
6) Finally, a week after our subscription expired, we had a phone call from someone at OD talking at us in a very aggressive manner as to why we needed to stay with them. I think he may have been selling used cars in a previous life. The breathtaking bit was when we were informed that visitors to our cottage were OD’s clients and not ours. Oh really O’Reilly?

Nuff said. Previously we left HolidaylettingsUK for similar reasons and have now moved across to the ‘obvious successor company’, just hoping that we won’t have to go through the same mill again in a few years time. As for OD, we don’t give a monkeys. But it would be nice to hear in due course that they have failed due to their complete intransigence, insincerity and plain disregard for people. Sorry guys, you can’t import that sort of Trumpist model over here. Oh, and don’t bother replying.