After a hard year, my partner Caroline and I were looking forward to a rustic weekend out of the city. Neither of us have much time for vacations. Unfortunately, the place we booked through Hipcamp was nothing like the accommodation that we ended up staying in. We were hugely overcharged for something very different than we agreed to pay for. Thankfully HipCamp kindly offered us a full refund of $385 for this disaster.
We booked the rustic barn "The Annex" from Tim Ganon.
After writing two emails to Tim he finally responded. We didn't hear anything from Tim until shortly before our stay, when he asked us if we would mind moving to another space on the property. This space wasn't advertised on the site but we were assured it was the same in feel - but just bigger. He described it as an "upgrade." This meant we were expecting a barn like, stand alone structure with gas oven, steam shower and a nice view. These were the assets that inspired us to book "The Annex" in the first place.
When we arrived to the property we were led to an addition on Tim's house. Not stand alone. In fact the walls into the home were so thin, we could hear the tv and the barking dogs and people's conversations. The interior space was completely different, no wood walls, no oven, nowhere to cook and a tiny sink. The toilet wasn't working properly when we arrived and the previous guests recycling had not been removed. The place was generally not very clean. Normally we wouldn’t make a fuss over such things (minus the toilet!) but we had a very unpleasant interaction with Tim that made us so uncomfortable we didn't want to call him.
After we had been let into the apartment, by someone other than TIm, my partner Caroline called Tim's phone number as we wanted to go into town to go grocery shopping and realized we had not been given a key. Tim answered the phone with a curt and aggressive “what happened?!”. When Caroline introduced herself and asked about the keys, she was told "I've lived in this house for 35 years and never had a problem. Your things are safe here!" Then he hung up. His manner was far from friendly. A little later he walked over and opened the front door--without notifying us first. He handed us a pair of keys he'd found and when we tried to express our disappointment in the space and ask whether we could stay in the Annex for one of the two nights, he told us it was booked. It was clear he had asked us to move spaces because he had someone who wanted to stay there longer than two nights. He was very unpleasant and he actually just stood up and left mid-conversation. At this point we felt very unwelcome, however we had no alternative accommodations to fall back on, so we stayed in Tim's apartment in his house.
We are both experienced campers, and were not expecting five star accommodation obviously — to the contrary we wanted our space to feel like country lodging. That's why we booked with hipcamp! But for $175.00 a night - we didn’t receive what we were promised at all and frankly felt unwanted and unsafe. In order to remedy this situation we are asking for a partial refund of a $175.00. We have no issues paying for one night. We had actually tried to find somewhere else to stay, but we were in the middle of the woods and had no other options.
We emailed Tim afterwards to ask about a partial refund, and now over a week later, he still hasn't responded. Thankfully, Hip Camp issued us a full refund, which testifies to how amazing this company is to deal with.