Originally Posted by
Often1
It's a business proposition. You are in business. They are in business. If you don't like the deal, don't take it. If consumers don't like it, they will book elsewhere.
That is all that matters. Complaining does not.
No, it goes beyond that. The deal was made and I paid the price. They've now arbitrarily changed the deal. As I said, we pay a price for a listing position in searches. The higher the price, the higher you show up in the listing when someone searches your particular property or location. This is what we paid for at the start of our annual contract. No conditions, no rules, just choices on how you preferred to do things but those choices were up to you - you got what you paid for. And it isn't cheap. Anywhere from ~$500 to $1,000 per year or more depending on the position and features you choose.
They've now changed the rules mid-stream where they rate you as an owner based on things like whether you use their 'book it now' feature, whether you block off your calendar for whatever reason (using your property yourself, for example) and them not getting a commission from it, whether you use their payment feature or paypal/checks etc. and so on. Their arbitrary rating system now determines, in part, where I show up on searches. None of those things used to, or should, affect the level of service, namely your listing position, that you paid for. Now, they do. So I pay more but end up at the bottom of a pile of other properties who have paid less than me because I choose not to enable immediate booking. Or because I choose to accept a check vs their credit card system. That's just wrong.
Not to mention that when we formed our contract with VRBO and paid our money to list, it was advertised to us as no fees were charged to the customer. That (among other things) is one of the reasons I chose them over AirBnB as I thought that more people would book on a site with no costs to them. And I was willing to bear the cost of that advantage myself whereas AirBnB is free to me. Now they've reneged on that.
I did not choose to do business with them under these conditions and I am no longer getting the service I paid for. So yes, I can leave when my contract is up but I am now at a disadvantage on other sites by virtue of being a new member with no reputation. A reputation I have worked long and hard to build on VRBO with years of stellar reviews.