Stay away from the Tropical Dream Villa in Davenport, Florida if you dont want nightmares(2 Messages)

codemonkey
Posts: 1

4 Jan 2008 2:35 AM
In October 2006 my wife and I were searching for a villa for our family holiday in October 2007. We found what appeared to be the perfect place for a 3 week monster holiday in Florida. It was called Tropical Dream Villa and from the info on the website it sounded perfect for us and our three children ranging from 8 to 12 years old. Since I was going to be celebrating my 40th birthday and my youngest daughter would turn 8 years old three days later we thought it would be the perfect place for us to do a double-birthday vacation.

The main thing that most attracted us to this villa over the others was the huge pool, a Disney themed bedroom and the option of a Disney Princess themed bedroom if required. Since my youngest daughter was princess mad we knew she would simply love it to bits.

The villa was booked and paid for without any problems. The owner was very friendly and helpful all the way leading up to our holiday. We were so impressed with it all that we booked our park tickets and car hire through the websites recommended to us by the villa owner, even though I could have saved over £60 GBP buying them elsewhere.

A few weeks before the holiday a villa welcome pack arrived through the door with a loud thump on the wooden flooring. We were expecting a few pages with address details and a few other bits and pieces, but this was an enormous tome of information. Very through and full of detailed information about the villa and the area in general. It did however seem to contain rather a lot of warnings about the penalty charges that would befall us should anything be broken, lost, damaged or generally messed up. I suppose one can’t really blame the owner for wanting to warn guests about potential problems, and I expect this pack has built up over time based on past experiences. We have been on plenty of holidays before and never once had any problem with breakages or losing any deposits along the way, so we reckoned we would be safe enough.

On arrival at the villa we were somewhat shocked and disappointed. The villa had been empty for 3 weeks or so and dust had settled on just about everything. One would have perhaps expected the management company to come out the day before or even early on the day we arrived to give it a quick dusting, but no such luck for us this time.

We also noticed that in every room there were little laminated notices stuck all over the place. Some told you what you must do, and some told you what you mustn’t do, and most of them told you how much money it would cost if you failed to take heed of the warning. Stuff like "don’t lose the front door key or the key box lid else it would cost $150 to replace" and "don’t turn down the air-con too much or it will freeze up and be very expensive to fix" and another warning about not putting all of the kids toys back in their correct boxes in the correct rooms on departure are just some examples. To say we felt somewhat intimidated would be an understatement. There was even a warning about the next door neighbour being a state trooper as if we didn’t feel scared enough already. We had gone on holiday to relax, not to constantly be worrying that the kids might be putting the wrong toy in the wrong box, or frightened of having the air-con unit on too long in case it froze up and cost us a load of money. After reading through the villa guest book it was clear that we were not the only guests that had felt this way.

However the straw that broke this particular camels back was the fact that there was no Princess bedroom prepared for our youngest daughter. She was so looking forward to sleeping in a princess bed and she broke her heart when she found out that her bedroom was just an ordinary bedroom. After contacting the owner by email, someone from the management company arrived later that day to change over the bedding, but all that was available was a princess duvet cover – no sheets nor anything to go inside the duvet cover. Even the lady from the management company agreed that it wasn’t very good, and my wife and I certainly weren’t happy with it. As for my daughter, she wouldn’t even go in the bedroom and spent her first night sleeping in the other bedroom with her older sister.

Later on that day I got a call from the owner who had been looking online and found some princess quilts at a "local" Wal-Mart. However she wanted me to drive the 30 mile round-trip to collect them and pay for them with my own money. For the sake of peace and harmony I agreed to do this and I did eventually get the $85 dollars back after a week or so of emailing reminders.

The reason we were given for the room not being ready when we arrived was because we had not specified the requirement on the booking form. However the owner knew that we wanted this particular option as she had even discussed it on the phone with my wife when we first made the booking, and she even sent our kids a countdown to holiday calendar for 2007 with some pictures of Disney princesses because she knew our daughter liked them. When we returned back home to the UK I got the booking form out and there isn’t even any space to request such an option, and nowhere on the form or the terms and conditions does it say that the option had to be requested at the time of booking. Needless to say, we were not particularly impressed.

The day before we departed we were given the option of a late checkout on the condition that we put a first load into the washing machine to assist the cleaners when they arrived. A few days after returning home I had an email from the owner saying that "a number towels had been stained and it was not washing out and did we know what the stains might be". Well we had no idea what the stains were because they were fine when we left for the airport. I asked for them to take some photos of the stains but no proof of any stains was ever provided. I do feel that I have to right to ask for something like photographic evidence if I am being accused of something and have no way to inspect the damage in person.

Two days later yet another email arrived, this time accusing us of taking home one white pillow case from the Disney bedroom. It also suggested that perhaps the towel stains were from a tanning product or due to colours being mixed with white during a wash. I cannot imagine why anyone going to Florida has any need for a tanning product as there is always a free one up in the sky on most days of the year – its big bright yellow and very hot. My wife also worked at a well known UK dry cleaning company for a number of years and is therefore well aware of how to do laundry.

In the end the owner decided to charge us £60 from our security deposit for the towels, but there was never any further mention of the lost pillow case. They have never been able to provide any proof to us of the alleged staining so we are simply left wondering if this is yet another way of milking a bit more money out of us. I expect they could buy an awful lot of towels for £60 but I imagine there was never any need to replace them in the first place.

In the end we did have a really good time in Florida and will definitely be going back to Orlando again.

Would we return to the Tropical Dream Villa again – ABSOLUTLY NOT
Would we recommend this villa to anyone - ABSOLUTLY NOT (unless you like living in Colditz)


codemonkey

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