Rent a flat in central London - How we have been stolen by Clifford Lynch and Homelidays

I can't read the homelidays site as it's in French (or Spanish or Italian) therefore I'm unable to read their terms and conditions however it seems unusual that there is no insurance or protection in place by the firm. It should not be expected that customers should pursue their own refund direct with the homeowner notwithstanding the alleged problem with the site which resulted in the failed booking. Have you pursued this enough with homelidays?

That hurts to lose that amount. Thank you for taking the time to warn people about the owner of the flat and homelidays not pursuing your refund just because the payment was already given to the owner. I hope homelidays is not allowing an unscrupulous owner remain on their service. Please pursue your refund with homelidays as they should be the ones going after the owner or they have no credibility for their service.

Sounds to me like homelidays is not a reputable site. It was their mistake and they did not fix it.

Sorry this happened to you.

Sounds like a scammy company. Sadly, there are all too many of those masquerading out there - it's not hard to toss up a website. Any site that requires you to prepay up front should cause one's BS detector to ping. That's not to say that prepayment is always a fraud (it's not - I've prepaid for accommodations several times), but one really, really needs to check out the company before sending any money (remembering that using a credit card to pay such things does give you at least a bit of protection).

Did you pay with a credit card or PayPal? You may have recourse through your payment mode. Good luck!

Trying to make sense of this. The portal had a “technical bug” yet the money was sent to the owner. I know that any of the family of Home Away type sites which includes this one and VRBO are very advanced in their computing and money is not transferred to an owner unless it’s tied to specific dates which are then noted as booked on the sites calendar. What is the rest of this story? Either this is another first time poster spam or there are other facts.

Either this is another first time poster spam or there are other facts.

yeah, always makes me wonder when these type of posts show up. It is a first time poster.