Two House Rentals Gone Wrong, and a Guardian Angel

Posted by Chuck Bolotin - Best Mexico Movers on April 16, 2017

Now that it’s over, I can tell you about it.

• We found the rental on the very popular site VRBO.  (This means nothing. VRBO is just a place for owners to place listings.  We received zero support from VRBO in resolving our dispute.  On a related subject, Craigslist is a very popular place for out and out scams.  Be very, very careful using Craigslist.)

• The pictures of the house looked nice.  (All this means is that the person taking the pictures knows how to present a property.  Very few people—other than Mexican nationals, which, from an American viewpoint, is hilarious—will take pictures of dishes in the sink, dirty toilets, laundry being assembled for folding, etc.)

• The owner was an American.  (All this means is that the owner understands your culture; it doesn’t mean that he or she will be honest, etc.  Some of the outright scammers take advantage of Americans or Canadians who put trust in the scammer because the scammer is also American or Canadian.)

• The owner was extremely responsive in answering our emails and did so very specifically.  (Better than the opposite, but not, by itself, enough to guarantee she was telling the truth.)

• It was the first time the owner had rented through VRBO, so there were no reviews.  (In and of itself, this is not determinative, but it’s also not a good sign.)

We owner wouldn’t be at the home on the day we arrived and the rental was hard to find, so we were told to meet the housekeeper and her husband at the train station.  A woman who was standing by a truck with about 10 feet of furniture stacked in the bed seemed to be looking for someone, so we introduced ourselves.  Sure enough, it was the housekeeper, Maria, who instructed us to follow her and her husband to our rental.  Down several streets we rambled, trailing behind the sideways credenza and roped down chairs and tables.

What the shop area lacked in terms of any more than a few inches more than was absolutely required for our van to fit, it made up for with two snarling German Shepherds straining against two thick chains and those 12-foot metal gates with the barbed wire on top.  Because of the tight fit, I couldn’t completely open my door to get out, so I slithered out of the area created by the partially opened door held back by a wall, stepped in some dog poop, shut and locked the door, and went on my way to walk back to the house in the dark, accompanied by Maria and her kids, who for some unsettling reasons, felt the need to escort me.

The next morning, fresh from about 45 minutes of uninterrupted sleep, Jet and I scurried for alternatives.  Luckily, we found that Los Labradores (a self-contained, pre-planned community described in a previous article where everything worked) had a vacancy.  After our experience the previous night, in theory, something like Los Labradores sounded, looked, and smelled really good.  (It was really good.)  All we had to do was to get our items out of the house and leave.  Unfortunately, one of the doors wouldn’t open with the key that I had used the night before. The housekeeper Maria tried her key, which also didn’t work.

I wrote to the owner to tell her of our experience and very politely directed her where to send our refund.  She refused.  I reminded her of how she had written to us about several items that were demonstrably false, which didn’t seem to make much of an impact on her, because she still refused.  I even offered to pay her for several days that we weren’t even there.  No deal; she would keep it all.  Her exact words in an email to me were: “All I can say is that you are in Mexico and things are very different here. Unfortunately, I can not [sic] return the money to you. We had a deal and you broke it, not me. Good luck!”

Our second house rental gone bad experience was more than a month later at the beaches around Merida in the Yucatan in a home that was owned by a Mexican national with whom we had some differences of opinion that others have told us were cultural, but I’m not completely convinced.  For example, they didn’t see any reason to include bed sheets or pillows, while we did.  They had no problem with the cockroach that jumped up on the pizza to sample the pepperoni after we had opened the box for literally less than 30 seconds while, again, we did.  (I could just imagine the cockroach watching us from the time we entered, his excitement at realizing we had brought a pizza, but his lack of impulse control to wait until we had left to eat some.  In insect years, he was probably a teenager.)  There also seemed to be some confusion about who would be responsible in the event the house needed repairs.

That evening, Jet prophetically refused to unpack.  I gave her the least stained bed to sleep on, sans sheets, while I took the couch.  The next morning, I took the dogs for a walk.  Well, you couldn’t really call it a walk, because I had to stop regularly to remove stickers from my dogs’ paws.  Upon my return, as I arrived close enough to the house to hear it, I was treated to a blood-curdling scream.  Jet (who has no problems killing spiders, scorpions, etc.) had opened one of the cabinets and found it infested with cockroaches.  As if we needed it, this was the final straw.

We had several criteria, including a place that would accept dogs, was big enough for our van, had good Internet, and a vacancy that night.  As I drove towards Merida where I hoped we could find something, Jet researched using the Internet via our iPhone. Our strategy was to first establish a fallback position where, if everything else failed, we could stay a few nights.  Given the traveling I had done for work in the past, I had special status at Hilton brand hotels, so the Hampton Inn in Merida that accepted pets looked very appealing, although expensive, so it couldn’t be a long-term solution.

At first glance, the hacienda was impressive, with a lawn that must have measured half an acre by itself, bisected by a wide, straight walkway with lamps on each side leading to the steps of a very generous veranda.  Tilting against the veranda was a ladder being used by a man who was painting.  (Later, I would learn that this man’s name was JR.)  It looked like they might have been closed for restoration.  Simultaneously searching for my Hilton Honors club card, I asked JR if they were open.  He said they were, and called for his wife, Iona without leaving the ladder.

Within the last day, our dreams of being on the beach for three months with the dogs and us frolicking on the sand and in clear water had been dashed.  Seated in front of us now, our guardian angel Iona offered a consolation prize but one it turned out was much more realistic and ultimately a lot of fun—the two-bedroom suite just behind her (no cockroaches or stickers, but sheets included) and even a pool for us and the dogs to use.  It wasn’t the beach, but it was a wonderful solution in a very stylish and interesting place.  All we had to do was unpack.