Our trip last week to Maine was just lovely. We stayed in a house in Wells, near Ogunquit. We went to the beach, hung out at the pool and spent some time together at the house. It was nice to go out to eat (outdoor dining), which we hadn’t done in several months. It was nice to get away, particularly to an area I’d never been to before. It was nice to be able to read and do crossword puzzles, or have a drink and chat, on the screened-in porch. It was very nice to spend family time together.
However, the first day started off as a disaster. When we went to check in to the house, they didn’t have any information on us. It was in a gated community and they wouldn’t let us in. We called the company that arranged it, Vacasa, and it turns out they never sent the property manager the packet they usually send, which would have had our Maine certificate of compliance with COVID-19 testing.
This is despite the fact that we arranged this trip in January and sent in all our paperwork on time, and Steve heard back that we were good to go. Vacasa just didn’t do what they were supposed to do.
So that first afternoon, we were hundreds of miles from home with a 12-year-old and nowhere to stay the night. This was just a tad stressful, as Steve was on and off the phone with the company for two hours and we were driving around and stopping in various parking lots before we got an answer. We kept our composure but we were livid.
We did end up with somewhere to stay that night. Vacasa found us a rental house that was OK but nowhere I would have stayed for a week. It was very small. So we did have a place to stay but it was inconvenient to have to unload the car for one night (we didn’t want to leave a car packed with electronics) and repack the next day to move on. We also lost part of a day.
We were able to get into the original house the next morning. The property manager was very apologetic, saying Vacasa had botched things before and the board of directors had voted to stop using them at their properties. I’d never heard of Vacasa before (we found the house on Vrbo, which must have sent it out to a third party) so maybe it’s a local company. We won’t use Vacasa again.
The other annoying thing is that we got COVID tested twice for this trip. The paperwork we got said we had to be tested and send Vacasa the certificate of compliance “no later than 72 hours prior to check-in.” Just based on a literal reading of these common English words, “no later than 72 hours” would mean we would send them our paperwork by the Friday before our Monday arrival. So we got tested and sent them the paperwork before that Friday.
But no—we actually had to do the exact opposite of what Vacasa told us and send in our test results no earlier than 72 hours before check-in. So we had to get tested again the Friday before leaving (luckily I was already off and could take time to go) and had to hope we got the results back in time. We tested negative and sent them our results, again. I didn’t mind getting tested but I did mind getting it done twice in a week because Vacasa did not grasp the difference between “earlier” and “later.”
Oh, yeah—we’ve already been refunded a bunch of money.
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