The Sequim nightmare continues….Remember I told you about the nightmare experience we had with Brigadoon Vacation Rentals? Well you’re not going to believe what’s been going on since then. According to them, I woke up one morning, and decided to ruin their lives. It had nothing to do with their false advertising and filthy, decrepit home. Oh, and before you bad mouth them, you somehow owe them a courtesy call.

We have been constantly harassed by the owners of Brigadoon, the owner of the piece of crap we had to stay in for the first five days (Water’s Edge) AND now, the final straw, the owners of the second Brigadoon rental we stayed in (Hideaway Hut), have sent us a letter telling us they are going to sue us. I have received countless messages from other owners threatening to sue us as well. Let me start at the beginning.

When I called Brigadoon to rent Water’s Edge, I was given the hard sell. She kept telling me over and over how it was one of their most popular rentals and I needed to book at least six months in advance, blah blah blah. I envisioned a really nice place. What I did NOT envision was a run-down mobile home, with a shower door that didn’t even close, bathrooms that reeked of urine, sticky, filthy dishes and kitchen, dusty, dirty floors, and grime on the blinds so thick, it was repulsive to touch, and they think that I owe them a phone call to give them a chance to change me from one of their “best rentals” to an even shittier mobile home?!?! Honestly folks. I just can’t see how the responsibility lies with ME here. They somehow think that I should have spent my vacation looking for another place to stay, instead of sucking it up and trying to make the best of it. It seemed to me that it was just easier to clean the filth. Let me lay out the timeline for you:

July 1: Original Blog Entry

July 5: They finally check their referrers, see the entry and I get the first phone call from the owner of Water’s Edge. In this phone call he apologizes for the condition of the property, however keeps saying that it’s still satisfactory for Middle America essentially saying that if I wasn’t so snobby I wouldn’t have complaints. In all subsequent communications, he has decided that I made everything up. It’s not important to you, Middle America, that it’s a run-down mobile home because it’s got two bedrooms and it’s on the water. For $140 a night. How ya’ like them apples, Middle America? You all find the filth and broken-down acceptable.

July 6: The owner of Water’s Edge has somehow decided that my personal weblog is a public forum to which he is appointed moderator. No lie folks, he was answering your comments like he owned the place. He also tried to post what amounts to about 2 pages of comments from “satisfied” customers.

July 11: Somewhere around this time, the owners of Brigadoon apparently alerted their owners to my blog entry and I start getting all these fake comments. Some are from the same IP addresses (same person) where in one comment proposing to be someone who rented from them and was satisfied, and in another comment posing as an owner of another Brigadoon rental, telling me I am lying and threatening to sue me. (Rich, huh?) These morons are logging in under different names but the IP address (and sometimes even the email address!) is the same.

July 13: We finally leave Sequim. As we are packing up, and I’m putting the sofa bed, where the kids slept, back together, I notice that the sofa cushion was placed next to the heater vent. The heater vent was so hot, that it damaged the cushion. The leather appeared to have “shrunk.” Oy. I wish it had said somewhere that these vents were not normal heater vents and were electric. I’ve never lived anywhere where heater vents could get that hot. Sigh. So anyway, I left a note on the table for the owner telling the owner I would pay for the cost to replace the cushion. Steve got a call from them while I was in Louisiana. They wanted $500. Yes, wait, hold on to your hats, folks, they wanted $500 to replace a cushion on a $1600 couch. Rather than simply order a new cushion for the couch from the retailer or Barcalounger and forward us the bill, they wanted us to pay for a temporary fix to the damaged cushion, then to have a new cushion custom built, then to buy paint for the heater grate, and finally compensation for the “couple hours” of time it took him to paint the grate. When we balked at sending them $500 for the cushion and Steve asked for a quote, a receipt, anything to justify what the amount they were asking for, they faxed us an illegible copy of the purchase receipt for the couch. Steve threw up his hands in disgust.

July 11- August 11: We got more comments on the blog from “concerned citizens” that obviously had more insight into the situation than what I offered in my post, and then on August 11, the owner of Water’s Edge calls Steve at work to harass us further. He reposts on Aug 10, his two page long account of his satisfied customers. On Monday, August 11, he demands that I take the original entry down. He claims I am blocking the free flow of information on my blog because I am blocking fraudulent comments and him as moderator. Notice the irony that he wants any negative comments about his rental blocked. Then Steve gets ANOTHER email from the owner of Brigadoon demanding to know why I hadn’t called her before blogging. Here was his reply:

Marilyn,

Your demand for an explanation really underscores the point I made in my previous email about continued harassment, prolonging our negative experience for weeks after the transaction. 

In our view, there was no remedy to apply to the situation that would not have further negatively impacted our vacation.  Re-packing, moving, or arguing for our money back were not activities that we wanted to spend our limited vacation time engaged in.  As I said in my previous email, we felt that we were not dealt with honestly up-front about the property, yet we did what we could to minimize the impact on our family’s vacation.

I am somewhat surprised you would even ask why we would move to another Brigadoon rental.  We certainly were not going to spend our vacation scrambling to find another place to stay nor were we going to cut our vacation short.  What’s more, we had already pre-paid for the rentals and did not wish to engage in a protracted argument to get our money back.

The fact that you would openly wonder why we would not act to further inconvenience ourselves illustrates to me a certain disconnectedness from your customer experience.  My advice would be to create new avenues for customers to offer feedback and to act on that feedback.  For example, a simple check-out time customer survey would probably provide a lot of enlightening data on things you assume are going fine just because you’re not asking the questions.

You and your owners have handled this situation very poorly.  I am going to ask you people one more time to leave us alone.  The repeated, unwanted contact initiated by you and your property owners is not only a most illogical way to treat a dissatisfied customer, but the veiled threats and open hostility we have received serve no legitimate purpose except to inflict emotional distress.

 

Believe it or not, she sends him more email. On August 24, she sets up a wordpress “rebuttal” and clearly shows no signs of stopping the harassment. Sigh. The most ludicrous part of this whole thing is she’s howling about how I have ruined her business with my “lies.” However? For the last six weeks my stats on this entry show that daily average visits are usually less than 5 hits per day.

I’m still getting fake comments and we received a certified letter last week. It says “Please immediately forward a check for $500. If we do not receive payment within seven days we will be forced to seek a judgment from the court of Clallam County.”

So for two months I have held my tongue so as not to further inflame the situation while we’ve been threatened and harassed both at home, on vacation and at work. It has come to my attention that the owner of Water’s Edge has begun harassing my readers as well. That’s YOU, folks! Blows your mind, doesn’t it? But no more. They’ve finally crossed the line. Last I checked, the constitution provided me the right to free speech. Last I checked, we weren’t living in some communist country where any negative thoughts and comments were to be censored. I have the right to state my opinion that Water’s Edge was dirty and run-down. Look here for yourselves, people. Look at the header photo of the deck.

This is the actual deck and back of the home, taken facing the opposite direction from the picture in the above link:

I know what you’re saying… “Mmmm.  But it has a good floor plan!” But wait! That’s not all folks! The deck of this luxury home comes complete with spider infestation:

Yeah. Steve thought it would make a cool picture. Me? Not so much. This was right by the door to get in and out of the house onto the “luxury” deck.

If someone else had blogged about their experiences with Brigadoon, I would not have made the mistake of renting from a group of people who portend to rent beautiful homes on the beach, that are actually run-down mobile homes and then harass anyone who is dissatisfied. Had Brigadoon been HONEST up front, I would have known that we were renting A MOBILE HOME and gone somewhere else!

Steve sent them a $500 check because we are so tired of fighting with these people. I say it again, people: BEWARE OF BRIGADOON VACATION RENTALS! Use at your own risk!