When booking a vacation rental home, you should be able to expect to enjoy the property how you want, as long as you are following the rules.

What happens when after the trip, you get issued a penalty for breaking one of the rules, which you never broke?

That is what happened to this guy, but he found a great way to get his money back (and then some). Let’s take a look.

Want to charge us extra for something that didnt happen? Have fun with your reviews tanking.

This happened a few years ago.

My gf at the time (now wife) and I used to vacation in Asheville, booking cabins through a rental company.

She grew up there and loved it, plus she had friends/family in the area that we would visit while there.

Seems like a great time, and a reasonable rule.

One of the rules the company had was that no extra guest were allowed to stay overnight, or there would be a fee.

This rule never bothered us, as we never planned on having that.

But, we did invite a couple of my gf’s friends over to hang out for a little while.

They got there around 7-8 and stayed until about 11pm before heading home.

We finished the trip, had a great time and went home thinking all was good.

Are they just trying to get some extra money?

A couple days after we got home, I got an email from a woman in the rental company who claimed that their maintance guy saw that we had people stay over and we were being charged an extra $200 for breaking “occupancy” rules!

Next came a back and forth between her and I where I told them noone stayed overnight, and that they left around 1030-11pm.

But she claimed to me that “Occupancy” is anyone being in the cabin at all, which made no sense I looked up the legal definition of occupancy which did not side with her, but she told me it didnt matter and they would charge me the extra 200.

Cue the Revenge.

Well deserved in this case.

Between my gf and I, we got about 8 people with 20 different google accounts all leaving 1 star reviews on the company’s google page.

This took their rating of around 4.4 all the way down to the mid 3 stars (it was a local company).

Well someone higher up must have gotten wind of this and they knew exactly who did it.

Within a couple hours, I got several emails from the original woman and her supervisor apologizing for the misunderstanding and asking how they could get us to take down the bad reviews.

At least they want to make it right.

After telling them it was clearly not a misunderstanding, I told them to kick rocks since they wanted to treat us that way, and long story shorter than it could be, we ended up getting an offer of $200 off our next visit if we took the reviews down (and they obviously refunded me that extra 200 plus another 100 off that stay).

Karen, I hope you understand what occupancy means now, if you still have a job.

I would have just been happy the company wanted to make it right—no need to ruin their business.

Let’s see if the people in the comments feel the same way.

Sometimes leaving reviews is all you can do.

Yikes, I hope this person doesn’t have the same issues.

The commenter here suggests standing firm.

This person wants the company to write an essay!

Yeah, that lady really shot her company in the foot.

What ever happened to companies putting the customer first?

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.