Villa Phyllia, a Property With History

We can adapt to both basic stays and luxurious ones, as long as the price makes sense. We’d dreamed of visiting Crete, Greece, and booked six nights at this villa based on its Booking.com photos. When we arrived, I wondered if we had the wrong place. The owner’s pictures don’t match what we found. The property seemed abandoned and in ruins, with very little electricity. The villa was dirty and felt dangerous. The windows and doors were rotten, there were cobwebs and live and dead insects, cracks in the walls, and a staircase that was coming apart. In the kitchen, the 1920s wood stove and the electric stove were both unusable, and the latter was filthy. Outside, the garden looked like a jungle, with a fountain whose tiles were broken, pots, debris, and trash. When I raised our concerns, the owner called it a rustic villa. I felt the condition was so obvious that he was either blind, delusional, or very dishonest. We didn’t want to stay even a few hours. Thankfully, an honest, compassionate family helped us get out of that situation. We found an idyllic, clean place for a third of what we would have paid to stay at this “villa.” I hope Booking.com is more careful about allowing places like this to be listed, since we’ve used the site a lot. Thank you to Booking.com customer service for helping us cancel.