What a shock this review was to us! We hope that our future guests will notice that out of 25 reviews, 24 give us 5 stars, and this is the only negative one. It has taken me 3 years to come round to needing to respond to it, because I thought initially that the level of vitriol and incoherence spoke for itself in the review, and that it would be discounted given the many reviews that give us 10/10 for cleanliness. I found this review so offensive that I thought replying to it would just make things worse. But Tripadvisor have a policy of never taking down reviews however bad they are (home owners beware) and we have noticed that we now get hardly any bookings through this website since this review: it remains very visible, and some holiday makers have said they have found it useful, presumably this means it has put them off booking, so I realise I should have replied to it much sooner.
When we received a note from this guest saying she thought the house was not clean, we called her and apologised for any shortcomings, and immediately offered her a full refund for 6 hrs of cleaning, which is the full amount of time usually spend on the house in a changeover. We reviewed with the cleaner what had gone wrong, and he admitted that things like grease on lamp shades and the cooker hood were areas he had missed. He was lovely but not a professional cleaner, and it is true that he had probably not done quite as thorough a full clean for these guests as he should have done, and he has since moved on to a different sort of job, and he was mortified that errors on his part could have caused this vitriolic review. We actually arrived at the house at the end of this guest’s week there, and were able to look at what she had commented on, and we were very upset that the comments were so out of kilter with reality and so ludicrous. Nevertheless, guests will be reassured to know that we have since 2019 appointed a very professional cleaner, and who has been a loyal cleaner and housekeeper for the last 3 years, so our guests can be confident that everything is being done really thoroughly and well.
A few things I would like to mention in reply to these specific comments:
1. In our conversation – and in her review - this guest informed us that she always strips beds in every house she visits to check the mattresses, and she said that she always takes a full set of towels to lay over the sheets in case the owner’s sheets are not clean. This indicates that she starts her holidays with a policy of distrust and a wish to find fault, and it is not normal to sleep on ones own towels. I can reassure guests that all our mattresses are in good condition and not stained (she was never able to produce the photos when we asked her to do so, since we wanted to be able to show tripadvisor that her claims were false). Our mattresses are covered with waterproof mattress protectors so they cannot get stained, and these were on the beds when this guest stayed; all our linen and towels come from John Lewis and our laundry is done by a professional laundry in Stornoway each week, so any suggestion to the contrary is false.
2. The comments in this review on our sunroom are quite extraordinary and give a totally false impression: our sunroom was redecorated 3 years ago and is beautiful, with a natural wood floor and its state is usually immaculate. We did move the sofas around and found one dead fly under one of them. We have made our cleaners aware that they must not forget to remove all sofa cushions and hoover up any crumbs left by guests in the corners under them, and must also hoover behind and underneath the sofas.
3. I would like to reassure guests that every room in the house has been redecorated in the last 5 years, so the suggestion that the paint is peeling off and needs a good overhaul in every room is completely untrue. There is one small area where paint peels off, which is on the skirtings on the staircase, since they get a lot of wear and tear from guests banging their suitcases against them, and they have been repainted also in the last 3 years, and we regularly repaint them.
4. The comments about the downstairs single bedroom, and this guest’s fantasies about it, are completely off the wall, it is a normal single bedroom with a bright aspect looking across the garden to the neighbouring croft.
5. When we arrived after this guest left we found one of our very nice lamps in our main bedroom broken; this appeared to have happened through it falling onto the floor, and we believe this may have been done by these guests who wrote this review since according to the cleaner it was fine the week before, and we think it is a sign of their extraordinary efforts to take the bedroom apart and strip off and turn over all our mattresses to check on them. However, we made no deduction from the deposit for this.
6. This guest threatened to give us a bad review as soon as she had left, and in response we did give her a full refund for 6hrs cleaning. She waited a week before posting her review - not only to receive that extra ‘cleaning refund’ payment from us which I sent instantly - but also I believe to make sure she got her full £150 damages deposit back from us with no deductions, despite breaking a lamp and incurring extra internet charges (see below – we never made a charge), and then she loaded her bombshell review once she had got her full refund and the extra payment.
7. When I tried to call her to speak about her comments - and her threat to produce a horrible review, which I suspect she made in order to achieve some sort of refund - I spoke to her mother on the phone who said, in response to my enquiries and apologies if there had been anything wrong at the house, that there had been no problem with the house at all and that they had had a lovely time.
8. We think we know a reason for this guest’s anger. At the time of this guest’s stay, we had limited internet provided at the house (this is not the case now, we have unlimited fast broadband) and after she had been there for 3 days the guest had to ring us to alert us to the fact that the internet had stopped working and it transpired it had run out: we checked on this and discovered that (presumably through constant streaming of content) her family had used up more than half of the monthly allowance in 3 days, and we had to pay for extra to be provided to her, which we did immediately, but we said that as per our terms we would deduct the extra cost to us, which was about £20, from her deposit. We never did deduct any money from her deposit. But I think this interchange may have angered this guest and caused her to get into a bellicose frame of mind. (It is important to note that we now have unlimited broadband at the house, supplied by EE since 2019, and it has very fast download and upload speeds.)
