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

Posted by on

Dear travellers,

Looking for a nice week in London we found out a charmous one for rental in central london thanks to homelidays website.
The owner Cliffors Lynch offers a very nice flat for our 2 kids and ourselves. The dates were OK and we booked it by paying a deposit of £547.20. Then Homelidays portal had a technical bug and the booking was not properly done.
Having paid £547.20 as a deposit we have sent a complaint to Homelidays for being refunded.
As the money had already been transferred to the owner account, Homelidays invited us to get in contact directly with him for this reimbursement. And of course, Cliffors never paid us back this money.
Obviously, paying such an amount for a flat that we had no chance to enjoy is more than unfair.
Take care when looking for a flat, and avoid to book something with this thief.

Posted by
5269 posts

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?

Posted by
375 posts

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.

Posted by
4334 posts

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

Posted by
6788 posts

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).

Posted by
4750 posts

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

Posted by
2707 posts

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.

Posted by
1112 posts

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.

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