Your Luxury Escape - Ground Luxury

I stayed at Byron Baythers, which is centrally located and has a brilliant pool area. What matters is how a place handles a problem. My sink was blocked, and the water from the old spa tub made that a pretty bad situation. The manager sorted it out without fuss and moved me straight to an entire apartment level upstairs. Problem solved, and a five-star response.

We booked a villa for 14 nights at about $750 a night. After spotting a lot of issues on the first night, I emailed straight away. They took about four days to reply, and only did so after I called to follow up. They acknowledged it was a very short delay.. 😂 Nothing got fixed. I sent several emails afterwards and never got a single response. There was construction at the other property in the duplex, on the same driveway, which wasn’t mentioned in any ad or email before or during our stay. Workers started at 7am, literally a metre from the bedroom window. One burner on the gas stove was explosive. Central heating was inadequate, overheating upstairs while barely warming downstairs, and cold air came through the unsealed garage door. None of the downstairs fans worked, and construction blocked the driveway and garage door for almost the whole stay. Ugh, there was more, but I’m done giving this any more energy.

We drove from Brisbane to Ocean Shores for a four-night getaway at a property listed by 'Your Luxury Escape', starting Saturday, July 5th. When we arrived, we got a call saying the property was no longer available because of a “technical error.” They said they’d relocate us, but the alternative wasn’t comparable or acceptable, and we’d chosen the original place carefully to suit our preferences. The office gave us conflicting information. One person said the property was being cleaned for us; another said it was unavailable. We were repeatedly told someone would call back, but had to chase each time. They also kept refusing our requests to speak with the property manager. Late in the afternoon, the manager finally contacted us, promised an immediate refund and said someone would follow up Monday. It’s now been over a week, with no refund and no further communication. Our calls and messages are still unanswered. The whole experience was frustrating, disorganised, unprofessional and deeply disappointing. Based on how they handled it, I’d strongly advise against booking with this host or agency.

The house, host and communication were all wonderful and helpful at first. But at the end of our stay, the booking agency was far less friendly. We left the property very clean, then they said we’d damaged the floor in front of the fireplace. We disputed it, but they didn’t take anything we said into consideration and charged us $340 to fix what we felt was supposedly minor damage and an overpriced repair. It took more than a month and a lot of chasing to get the rest of our security deposit back. We won’t book any of their properties again.