Hi there,
Here is the first part of this post:
Three days passed and the couple that was staying in our house still had not deigned to respond to our message on the platform to say whether they wanted to continue with the exchange or not.
Fortunately, we saw that we could change the return date and that it was not as much money as we thought, so in that aspect we were more relaxed.
Considering that we were in Australia, it would have been easier if they would just go to IKEA or any other store to buy what they needed and they would not have lost the possibility of hosting their friends.
Because although it was clear that they had lied and that from the first moment they had planned to get their friends in my house, if they had not been irrational, we would not have forbidden their friends to stay.
We were also quite shocked that they had not had any cordial gesture with us since we had arrived at their homes. The logical thing in these experiences is for communications to be as cordial as possible, even when you are upset.
In short, in less than 24 hours we had a situation that for me was unbearable for a silly thing. We had made an exception for them to use both rooms, we did not refuse when they said they had invited their friends and I had offered to buy them whatever they needed (even though they wanted me to buy sheets and towels for their friends). To then have to read complaints regarding the weather when we had repeated ad nauseam to them to look at the weather forecast so they would be prepared.
After 3 days without a response, we contacted customer service again because Mar and Val were unresponsive and that it was unacceptable that they would stop talking to us because they were at our house, and we were at theirs.
After we sent the message, Val responded that they had no intention of canceling their stay at our house.
We sent a message to Warren, who was assisting us to ask what guarantees we had if we decided to cancel the exchange since we had informed ourselves on the website and we did have certain guarantees.
He never responded and there we realized how bad Home Exchange works and that you really don’t have any help if the home exchange ends badly.
The next day Val sent us via WhatsApp a photo of a letter that had arrived from the Attorney General’s Office and it was lucky because in that letter I was summoned to testify on April 8. This meant that we already had another reason to return to our house.
I could have tried to change the date, but I was not going to put up with their rudeness and hostility for 3 months.
We immediately sent a message to the Home Exchange emergency email with the photo of the letter and notified them that we were leaving April 3 from Sydney and arriving April 4 in Porto at 7Am, so they better be out of our house by April 3.
We also notified Mar and Val through the platform.
After writing several times, Warren finally responded and said that he was already helping Mar and Val to find a new accommodation.
From Mar and Val, we did not receive any response on the platform chat.
A few days later, we decided to check the Smart plugs in the house and they were all “offline” which means that they had taken it upon themselves to disconnect the smart plugs just to annoy us.
We wrote to them again through the platform, always with the utmost cordiality, to ask what had happened since they cannot disconnect the appliances from the smart plugs.
We have 4 smart plugs: water heater, 2 stoves and the dehumidifier.
The water heater Smart plug is set to charge during the early morning hours and the dehumidifier smart plug is set to run from 7AM to 22h.
The two Smart plugs on the stoves had no programming.
They responded by saying that they did not like the schedule we had set for the dehumidifier and so they disconnected it, which made no sense as we had told them that we could modify the schedule to be the most convenient for them. All they had to do was tell us.
Regarding the water heater they said that they “had run out of hot water several times and that the Smart plug would turn off from time to time”.
Again, we had been bombarded with lies.
I sent them another message in which I emphasized they needed to maintain communication since they cannot do whatever they want in our house; furthermore, I told them that it was very strange that supposedly the heater and the smart plug are malfunctioning when they are new and when in almost two years we have not had any problem and the person who stayed in our house in November did not have any problem either.
Most importantly, if something in the house is not working and you are running out of hot water, the normal thing to do is notify the homeowner so they can get the problem resolved.
So once again, they had lied to justify their childish behavior.
There we wrote again to Warren from Home Exchange to give them a wake-up call that they were not going to spend the last two weeks doing whatever they wanted in my house and that, if that was what they wanted, we could change the flight again to get them out of my house as soon as possible.
The good thing is that they told us that they would be in Rome for a week and that left us more relaxed because it was a week in which we were not going to be worried about what these two people might be doing in our house.
Even so, we were worried because since Mar and Val were systematically lying to justify doing whatever they wanted in addition to being disrespectful and rude, we began to think that they had probably left the heating on during that week, which posed a fire risk.
With the excuse of verifying the supposed problem they were having with the water heater, I asked Nena to go to the house to see if everything was really unplugged. The good news is that they hadn’t left the heater on, and the bad news is that the house was a mess.
Mar is so absurdly irrational, that, having a giant empty closet in the downstairs bedroom, she had her clothes lying all over the floor in our room. Really, it was there that I realized that this woman could not be right in the head.
When they came back from Rome, we still had to write to them again and repeat for the sixth time that the appliances must be plugged into their smart plugs.
Within 5 days of them finally moving out of our house, we sent them another message to remind them of the house rules and that they should leave everything as spotless and tidy as they had found it. We also wrote to Home Exchange to ask them to please do what they could so that these people would not destroy our house.
Lessons learned after this lousy experience:
- We thought that maybe a 3-month exchange was too long and that from then on, the most we would do is one month. It was better to stay wanting more than to leave bored with the place.
- Maybe for places that are so far away from our home, for safety reasons it is better to go on vacation, pay for a hotel and that’s it. If we had been in Europe, as soon as Mar started complaining with her bad manners, we would have cancelled the exchange and returned home.
- Home Exchange is most likely not going to give you the support you need so it is good to be prepared and have other options.
- The most important thing is that we are never going to make exceptions again. After Heidi’s stay, it was clear to us and with this experience, even more so.
Finally, I want to tell you that Mar and Val did not get another place to continue with the three-month exchange because finding someone who can afford to be out of their country for 3 months is something exceptional. In the end, they had to go to tourist accommodations where they were not going to have anywhere near the comfort they had in our house. This, in addition to having to rent a car, meant spending thousands of euros that they would not have had to spend if they had behaved like normal people.
But the story does not end here, we still have the last week of their stay in which they complained ad nauseam.