Bad Decision to Rent from Tuscany Now & More. Don’t Repeat our Mistake.
We rented a two bedroom house from Tuscany Now & More for the first two weeks in July. The company website’s photos and narrative cleverly misrepresented the house, deceiving us. Our complaints while there and since were ignored or met with double talk. Buyer beware. We own our responsibility. Tuscany Now & More does not. The company never should have accepted this particular house for its portfolio in the condition we found it nor at the price charged.
The problems included: terrible driving directions that omitted the town’s name when giving the name of the street leading to the house; one of the two bedrooms had a mat, not a mattress, providing insufficient support, and the other bedroom (upstairs) had a mattress that was barely acceptable. That room has a sloping ceiling too low to walk under; an ancient washing machine that never should have passed a company’s inspection; a house filled with ants inside and out, requiring several treatments to get rid of them; a pool too small to swim in (we were aware of this deficiency before our departure but believed there was adequate compensation in the other features being extolled); chaise lounges near the pool with no good back support for reading and very thin cushions, and with no umbrellas beside them for shade; a kitchen with minimal equipment; a back door that once unlocked had a faulty lock that could only be relocked by their representative, making the door unusable; when the wind was blowing in our direction, an aroma of pig feces outdoors that required us to retreat indoors.
Reporting the problems with the house proved useless. After we arrived at the house and discovered its deficiencies we complained to the local representative (who is the one asset to the house). She informed us that the house’s owner denied these issues were a problem but two days before departure, we learned that the mattresses and washing machine would be replaced. While at the house we sent Tuscany Now and More our complaints. We received no response.
We have been renting houses in Italy for more than thirty years. We know how a house should be priced. The rental price for this house was completely out of line. After our return home we pointed this out to the rental company owner, Simon Ball, and asked for a partial refund. He refused. He claimed that another renter’s review was ours, which it is was not. The website now has an inserted box stipulating that complaints need to be addressed to the London office, not the company’s local representative nor the house owner. Yet Mr. Ball excused the office’s non-response to the complaints we sent to that office as being due to the office staff being too occupied helping people with covid related problems. This is a company that prefers double talk to straight talk, to having things both ways to their benefit. Again, buyer beware.