Note (12/18/08): I received a call from AlwaysOnVacaiton requesting me to take down this post and threatening me with legal action. Apparently they haven’t researched the recent free speech rulings handed down by the courts. However, I will remove the few choice words I had for their management team, as they don’t materially add to the post anyway. Blows my mind the tried to intimidate me with a phone call threatening legal action, I say “bring it on”. It would be great PR for me. I’ll send it to every press outlet in the nation.
Gotta love the *!@# at alwaysonvacation. First they hired Indian call centers to harass me to list my personal properties on their junk vacation rental listing site. Now they are hiring Indian link building firms trying to get reciprocal links to a bunch of no content regional sites that only serve to feed into alwaysonvacation.
Ding..ding. I’ll be the first to report them to Google.
It’s one thing if they were smart about it, but they’re not. Their tactics are so old. They might have worked years ago, but not Google will catch on sooner rather than later and then bye bye alwaysonvacation. I’ll be glad to see them go.
Here is a copy of their most recent spam to me.
Dear Webmaster,
I am webmaster for some vacation rental sites. I came across your site and liked it very much, while searching for some quality and informative travel sites. I would like to do link exchange with your site.following websites are categorized as vacation rental, travel, real estate, hotels, car rentals, etc. and I found your site to be in a related segment. So that I am inviting you regarding link exchange.For more details, you can visit our website.
Title:Arizona Vacation Rentals
URL:http://www.greatluxuryrentals.com
Description:Arizona vacation rentals in popular destinations such as Scottsdale, Tucson and Phoenix are available at Greatluxuryrentals.com. Find the perfect Arizona vacation home, villa or condo for you and your family.
Title: Maryland vacation rentals
URL: http://www.greatmarylandgetaways.com
Description: Directory of more than 1500 Disney Vacation rental homes, condos, villas, cabins and cottages by owners!
Title: Disney vacation rentals
URL: http://www.orlandodisneygetaways.com
Description: Directory of more than 1500 Disney Vacation rental homes, condos, villas, cabins and cottages by owners!
Please accept our link exchange offer.
Warm Regards,
Julia Thomas
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
I have been contactacted by Always on vacation dot com, wanting to go from $199 for their bronze package to $99 just to get me to sign up.
Since I had not had time to read the info and wanted to check them out, googled and found you and your not so happy camper response.
So to you this is a scam and they do not follow throught with their promises?
Thanks for your reply,
Carol
Hi Carol, personally I just don’t like any company who tactics rely heavily on telemarketing and the “hard sell”. I think they are overpriced and you are better off on the homeway network and of course, my site, vacationrentaldirect.com
I’ve listed my properties on the alwaysonvacation website for free to try it out, and I got a decent response, but they require that all property owners maintain a separate availability calendar…and I don’t have the time to update availability calendars on all these sites…that’s why vacationrentaldirect.com supports rentors.org calendars (homeawayconnect).
I get so many spam calls from alwaysonvacation I reported them. It’s always some foreign workers who can barely speak english and they have only one purpose - to take your money. Maybe if they were offering additional support or suggesting ways to improve your visibility, etc.. it would be a worthwhile call.
So my two cents is that alwaysonvac is a cancer to our industry and offers litle value add to rentors or vacation rental guests.
If you have any other questions, please let me know!
Hi, I had a terrible experience wirh AlwaysOnVacation.com: we rented a house published by this website in Miami Beach. Finally we were victims of a fraud. The house does exist, but the owner name does not exist. We have prepaid the total amount for this house in December 2008. AlwaysOnVacation did the first contact with the supposed owner of the property (property 414504) AlwaysOnVacation.com does not supervise the properties listed in their web site. They also told us that they have no responsibility in this matter. This cannot happen again.
I don’t think AlwaysOnVacation is to blame…Miami Beach is notorious for vacation rental fraud. We even publish a special disclaimer warning renters to be careful. It is not possible for all owners to be screened…sometimes fraudulent credit cards are used and it takes weeks for the credit card owner to report it.
It is the responsibility of the guest to due some due diligence. Make sure the property owner accepts credit cards, make sure they have a website, call the better business bureau, talk to the owner in person, etc.. There are many simple things that can be done to avoid fraud such as you experienced. Just be careful and use common sense! 99.9% of all vacation rental listings are legit.
I am the Designated Broker for a property management company in Arizona. We receive at least 2-3 calls per day from alwaysonvacation.com We’ve tried every possible tactic to stop them from calling us. We have asked nice, we have asked forcefully, we have even spoken to a supposed manager and it did no good. They are all a bunch of chai wallahs with only one specific task to call, call, call, harass you and beat it into your brains to advertise with them. Well guess what it will never happen. Not with our company and let this be a warning to anyone out there that is considering advertising with them. The parent company is Vacation Renter Solutions, LLC listed in California but when you call you are forwarded overseas to India.
*********Alwaysonvacation.com is a complete scam******
They have charged my credit cards without my authorization. Email enquiries are fake and generated by themselves. The call center is in India with all Indian workers introducing themselves with American names like Kevin Smith!!!!!! Be Ware. Cancel any credit cards you have given them.
Alwaysonvacation.com is one of the worst website in the Globe.
i have paid them $1399.99 two months before and they did not provide any business to me and they said i will give this and that but i did not get enquirers and got some enquaries but all was just fraud.
i asked then to return my money and they said that i will give you your money back but they did not and i am calling to them no body talk to me….!
Never list your property with them.
Robin Patrick.
Always on Vacation have given us ongoing problems too. We are just a small New Zealand based vacation rental company. We have tried politiely and not so politely many times to be rid of them, but they just keep on calling back - and each time the same relentless, agreesive sales attack. Week after week, for months now. We have a landline that diverts to our mobiles… their calls are not only frustrating but expensive!
If you are contacted by them, don’t waste your time being polite. Just tell them where to go. Hanging up usually just results in them calling you straight back. Help spread the word about how terrible an operation they are. They don’t deserve to be in business.
I would love to know more about the principals of this organisation… anybody else feel like they’d like to sue them for harassment?
We have a large estate in France where we have several rental villas. We were contacted just the other day by Vacation Rentals.com. They sold hard, too hard. An Indian man named “José” gave us an incredible deal..then asked for the credit card. He gave us a number to call so we would believe he was in California. Well, companies divert call center calls from the US to India everyday. So, he pushed and pushed.. we were finally sold and gave him one credit card, he said it didn’t work, could he have another? We gave him the other..it of course didn’t work either. Then he asked for the PayPal account..which we did. Now, we can not reach them, no return calls..which seems strange. No way to get a passcode to get on the account to add our site. So, today we have cancelled all credit cards, cancelled the payment and complained to PayPal, we will also write to Ryan Air as it is a scandal that Ryan Air should partner with such a company. Thanks for your blog. While this company is all over the Internet with complaints, it is nice to have a forum like yours to read about others and to be able to share our own.
GF
Meh, where do I start eh?
I agree with all the experiences of AoV and am glad that my advertisement on their sites has now expired. I can finally remove the AoV-lbatross from around my neck. Yeaaahhh!
I have for the last year been advertising with Always on Vacation and have received only one enquiry that converted into a booking. My villa advertisement was snatched by them from a British company they tried (unsuccessfully Thank God) to take over. While I still happily advertise with the British company Perfect Getaways, I am glad to say my stint on the underperforming pages of AoV is well and truly over.
When AoV began the merger they took the Ryanair (massive EU budget airline) portal link from PG with them and this is where the majority of our page traffic used to come from. However, no sooner than AoV’s hands took over did the site traffic visiting our Villa page through the Ryanair Airline portal plummet - but so too did the the all important number and overall quality of enquiries. The number of genuine enquiries (ie not me testing the form, and spammers sending me scam rental emails, or offers to SEo my own site etc) sits at 10 for 12 months… thats less than 1 a month - the Ryanair/Perfect Getaways link up and its predecessor both consistently brought me at least 7 enquiries a month. For a lot less money than AoV asks!
My subscription to PG and my own website now generate nearly 70% more enquiries than they did last year and I can only surmise that this is the traffic that used to find us on the Ryanair link. The AoV portals are overly complicated for what they do. Most people in Europe fly to a specific destination and want to stay in that destination - not the 200 sq miles of surrounding hinterland that AoV makes you search within. The search portal via their Ryanair linkup is very very poor and excessively difficult to navigate. People on the Ryanair site have a named airport or destination - thats all they need to search by. The moment they are asked for Region, Province, City, etc etc, it puts them off and sends them (evidently) to Google to find me and others a different way. Ryanair is a pan European website and most people speak a different language to the American English that characterises AoV’s many portals. The search interface is hard to navigate as a non English speaker, or person with little local knowledge of the destination other than an airport; and the AoV website itself is riddled with American English-isms (types of Bed, garden terminology, maid servicing details) that make no sense in the UK, let alone when auto-translated into French or German on their .fr and .de sites.
I’ve told this them many times in the last year and they have done nothing, except ask me to renew. I’ve written to Ryanair to complain about the current franchise contract with AoV (not sure what effect that will have, but ‘you gotta start somewhere, innit?’).
And dont even get me started with the annoying, patronisingly scripted cold call and renewal techniques that Always on Vacation use. Or the stonewalling they give you by email when you ask too many questions. Good riddance .
So, I am not renewing my subscription to AoV because they have underperformed at every level.
If you have holiday rental accommodation in Europe
Do yourself a favour and DO NOT ADVERTISE with ALWAYS ON VACATION
Faites-vous une faveur et ne pas faire de publicité avec AoV
Tun Sie sich selbst einen Gefallen und werben nicht mit AoV
Fatevi un favore e non pubblicizzare con AoV
Instead, use the $350 subscription fee to pay for more effective advertising or Search Engine Optimisation for your own site.
Thank you
I was just about to subscribe an advertisement with Always On Vacation and before that I decided to check in the Google if there were any comments… Then I’ve found this site! Is it really so bad? I rent a propriety in Portugal and they keep calling me all the time. I was “seduced” by the fact they are partnairs with Ryanair which is an air company working very well concerning european destinations.
Thanks for the great information. I’m getting quite a few phone calls from ALWAYS ON VACATION but thanks to you I just hang up as soon as I hear their name!
My wife was conned by an Indian salesman who suggested we would be in the Ryanair in-flight magazine! It never materialised and I believe that we have had 8 enquiries from the website listing and I wouldn’t be surprised if 6 of them came from AlwaysOnVaction as we couldn’t contact them! Stay away. Spend 300 Euros on Adwords from Google to get customers!
We signed up several properties with AlwaysOnVacation.com. Upon submitting our listings, we noticed that the AlwaysOnVacation staff went in and changed the verbiage of our listings significantly and inaccurately, representing that there was a pool at some, when there is not, and representing that some are at the beach, when we are nowhere near the beach! We contacted them about the incorrect changes they made and were speaking with someone seemingly from India, who acted like they didn’t know how our listing information got changed! We made the corrections and received few inquiries. Recently received several illigitimate inquiries, with no contact phone numbers, no arrival/departure dates, a couple with emails from the Netherlands, one wanting a long-term stay when it is very unusual to receive an inquiry in this area for a long-term stay, and all with names that are obviously foreign. We have been in the vacation rental business for over 30 years and it is obvious from our experience that these are bogus inquiries. What a waste!!!
We took 10 listings with AlwaysOnVacation.com in November 2010 at just under $50/listing. In November 2011, we were contacted about renewing our listings. We explained that we did not want to renew as we only got one booking from all of our listings and not many inquiries. Also, a lot of the inquiries were not ligitimate (didn’t have arrival/departure dates, were from Netherland based email address, had grammar errors and strange wording, etc.). Further, they were wanting to renew at a rate a little over three times the rate we initially paid! After telling them via phone and email repeatedly that we did not want to renew, we were charged a renewal fee for two of our listings in February 2012. They are saying that we were setup to automatically renew. If so, why did they contact us to try to get us to renew and several months later, when we still declined, charge our credit card? Also, when we first input our listings and later logged in to look at them, we noticed that someone had gone in and changed our listings, showing that some were at the beach (when we are in the mountains, far from a beach) and that some had access to a pool (when that was not the case). This company is extremely inefficient and dishonest! We have several listings on other vacation rental websites and in the years we have advertised on these, we have never had such issues!
Just to let you know that they started their dyshonest actions in french. I was contacted in Morocco by a person telling he his working for Ryanair (a lie!) and who tried to sell me a gold package. I cannot understand that Ryanair can work with a company with such bad records on the web.
I have had 6 or more calls from this company over the past 3 months - NO NO NO I say! Two today! They are doing a blitz for New Zealand holiday homes - watch out other kiwi holiday home owners & property managers. Stick to the local websites or do your homework. Good to read all the comments. Thank you.
I paid for a listing with them yesterday and asked for a refund today, so within the legal 7 days. They aare making it difficult. If they don’t do the refund I will use my leagal rights and also report them to ryanair and every forum I can.
But I will keep the feedback here…if they do what’s rights they can proove they are trustworthy.
Update: they told me they have processed my refund request and that I would receive the money within 24-48 hours. I want to believe this and will keep updating here.
So this motely crew are doing the rounds again. Being a Motel based in Dunedin NZ, I received a call from this company this morning. We will not pay a subscription to any site - commission only. This person calling would not take no for an answer, and true to form rang back. Told him to email the details, and is ringing back Monday, thought I would google Always on Vacation. Thanks folk for the warning!! Forewarned is forearmed!!
Wow…thanks everyone. I got a call today and looked over the site with the (guy from India) on the phone. Looked ok…but as I told him. I have to look into this first. THIS is very helpful. I will now have to deal with harassment calls it appears from reading other reviews. I do very well with the tripadvisor website….totally legit! I am sticking with that.
They refunded my money in 15 days and I have to say that , although some members of staff were annoying, most were ver nice and helpful. My feedback about alwaysonvacation is positive now.
STAY AWAY FROM THESE PEOPLE.
If you want to give your money for free then go ahead.
We are now getting harassing phone calls from different people within the company posing a managers and supervisors pushing sales.
We have asked to stop calling and they will now. Brian from India, Alex from India – my message to you – GET A LIFE.
POR FAVOR NO CONTRATAR. ALWAYA ON VACATION SON UNOS MENTIROSOS TE DICEN MIL COSAS HASTA QUE HAGAS EL CONTRATO LUEGO TODO ES MENTIRA , TE LLAMAN VARIAS VECES PARA INSISTIR Y QUE HAGAS EL CONTRATO LUEGO TE DICEN QUE ESTAN EN RYANAIR QUE LLEGARAN RESERVAS SEGURO MENTIRAAAAAAAA HASTA AHORA NO RECIBIDO NINGUN EMAIL NI A PEDIR DISPONIBILIDAD ?asi que os digo
NO CONTRATAR ALWAYS ON VACATION
NON FARE NESSUN CONTRATTO CON ALWAYS ON VACATION
PLEASE DON’T MAKE THE CONTRAT WHITH ALWAYS ON VACATION
It still goes on. They pretend to be calling from RyanAir actually. Promissing to be in in-flight magazine. I sent dispute form to cardholder… anybody had success in returning money?
I received a phone call from Alwaysonvacation this morning. A sales person pretended to be situated somewhere in San Ramon, California. He said that his name is Alex and he has a really profitable business opportunity for me. When I asked about it in detail he said that he can advertise all my properties free of cost on the website but I will have to pay commission on every booking they will offer. Is this true? Do they really except commission instead of a susbcription free.