Only Whole Vacation Homes. Only Your People... Unless the owners and a dog live there too

Our Partner Charlie Sim shows that relying on tech with little care for creating a human experience only leads to pain, effort and frustration for customers.

The Vrbo ads are enough to make anyone want a holiday. A stunning home. A beautiful family. Peace and quiet, fun and sunshine, adventure and excitement. Whatever takes your fancy. And most importantly, no one else to share it with.

Idyllic.

Except when no one also includes the property’s owners and a dog.

When the Brown family (not their real names, but they are real people who live a few doors down from me) arrived at their Vrbo rental home in Burgundy last summer for the first family holiday abroad since Covid they couldn’t wait for a fortnight in their own gite, with their own pool and their own privacy. But it turned out that all they were actually renting was a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom on the upstairs of the property while they shared the downstairs sitting room and kitchen as well as the garden and pool with the property’s owners and their dog.

The kitchen was very small, the dog was very large and the owner smoked in and outside the property.

Not so idyllic.

The family’s teenage daughters weren’t keen to sunbathe by the pool with the owner always in the garden and funnily enough, no one wanted to take up the hosts’ offers of dinner pour six.

After a week feeling more claustrophobic than calm and relaxed, they packed their bags and left. This wasn’t the holiday they’d planned.

It turned out that all they were actually renting was a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom.

But it wasn’t the end of the world, because Vrbo are a big and reputable company - owned by Expedia Group. They’d get in touch with them, explain that this wasn’t what they’d been promised, get their money back, book another holiday, put the Disaster in Bourgogne behind them.

But this was where the fun really started for them.

Vrbo’s brand promise is based on spending time with people you love - and only them. When they launched it in 2022, Hector Muelas, Senior Vice President of global creative at Expedia Group said, “Vrbo guests always get the whole place to themselves”. 

Seems very clear to me. In fact I love the promise.

Today it’s almost nine months later and Vrbo still refuse to admit that what the family bought wasn’t what they were sold. We all make mistakes and for platforms such as Vrbo they will make mistakes too, but it’s how brands respond to them that really matters. Vrbo’s response is the opposite of being customer-led and highlights the gap between a beautiful human brand promise and a disconnected tech-led reality.

When you look at what happened next, looking from the outside-in through the experience of the family, the lack of a human experience becomes very stark.

● They were forced to speak to a chat bot first, which is fine, but it couldn’t help with something this complicated and simply said they had to go somewhere else. Its responses felt like a machine that wanted the customer to make all the effort and didn’t reflect a brand that cared.

● When they eventually spoke to a Vrbo human their response was to tell them that they should have complained within 24 hours. Ignoring the fact that this was buried in the small print, it was a very difficult thing to do since the property had no wi-fi or mobile signal. That was another thing they’d been promised which turned out to be untrue.

● After radio silence for SIX weeks from their Vrbo claims handler, they took to Twitter and eventually got some engagement. They were asked to provide evidence that the owners had been at the property when they were there. The Browns sent them photos: the dog in the kitchen, the owner watering the garden. And crazily, these were rejected as insufficient.

● What exactly were Vrbo expecting? The Browns to ask the family (and dog) to pose alongside them looking angry like a photo from a local newspaper in the 1980s? Maybe collect the used cigarette butts like they do in TV crime dramas?

● Having your holiday ruined is bad enough, but then being treated without genuine empathy and asked to make all the effort, has made a bad situation even worse for the family. 

● The case still drags on for the Browns. There is no sign of a resolution. Vrbo continues to put up as many barriers as they can to protect revenue while minimising the effort they make to acknowledge their failings to their customers and make things right.

It is not easy to be customer-led, delivering your brand promise through your experience. We all naturally see the world from the inside-out, surrounded by colleagues, the business, and their industry. Customers can seem distant and peripheral.

What the Browns needed was a human experience to show empathy and understanding.

For Vrbo, they have created an experience that’s probably fine for 95% of the time and customers won’t have any issues. But for those, like the Browns, where the promise is not met it creates a much bigger impact than losing future customers. It creates a culture where not valuing the people that choose to give them their business grows: where it’s more important to limit losses and manage costs, rather than deliver the value they promise.

When the Browns complained, they could only speak to technology. What they needed was a human experience to show empathy and understanding. All you need to do is sit down and chat with the Browns and you can immediately understand how disappointed, let down and angry they’d felt when they arrived in their rental.

And for me this is the essential place where Vrbo are letting customers down.

They’re failing to see that in their line of business - pleasure, fun, relaxation, escapism - when it goes wrong, their customers are let down badly.

It’s not just a missing part of a flatpack. Or an Amazon delivery coming a day late. It’s the thing that people spend their lives saving for, looking forward to and needing to escape the craziness of everyday life.

Vrbo says proudly “Everyone knows how important it is to spend time together.”

But what they haven’t done is put that insight into their experience. If they’d have done that to the Browns from day one, their story would be very different.