NYC: HouseTrip.com

My friends and I are currently in the process of planning a trip to New York for next year. While looking for accommodation, we found HouseTrip.com, a website that enables you to rent houses, apartments, etc all over the world.

Sounds great, right?

We thought so. We looked at our options and picked out a choice of three, which met our budget and location needs.

Soon enough, the requests for availability came back and we were set to book.

That is, until I decided to have a look for reviews of HouseTrip.com, my quick google search didn’t yield much apart from a bunch of TripAdvisor links.

I’m not the biggest fan of TripAdvisor, while they are a good source of knowledge, a lot of the time you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to the answers you want. Most things have a negative slant on them. Which is a shame, because I know from experience that some places that have bad reviews on there, don’t deserve them - the reviews having been left by grumpy customers who feel the need to have some kind of revenge.

As I said though, the Google search didn’t return a whole lot, so I started to trawl through TripAdvisor and see what was being said about the site we were about to drop a bunch of money on for our New York trip.

As predicted, things started off negatively. However, there wasn’t any let up, negative post after negative post kept appearing and then, after all the negativity, the word “illegal” appeared.

Illegal? How could a site as big as HouseTrip.com be illegal? It’s being advertised all over the place. On my computer and my TV.

A law came into effect last May, which made apartment renting in New York City, for less than 30 days, illegal. The thread on TripAdvisor linked to this post on the Wall Street Journal website: Illegal Hotels in New York City Will Be Policed by Mayor’s Office - Metropolis - WSJ

Upon learning this, I messaged the appartment owner on HouseTrip.com to question them, on whether or not what they were doing was legal. Maybe they had a way around the law? I also sent a message to HouseTrip.com’s customer support team, asking them the same basic question. Was it illegal? Did they have a way to make it legal?

Dear Martin,

Thank you for contacting us at HouseTrip.com. 

To answer your enquiry, our website serves as a platform connecting registered users wishing to offer their rental space to potential guests looking for rental accommodation. 

According to our Terms of Use, hosts and the properties they rent should comply with any applicable local law requirements for short term stays. 

Local laws on rental accommodation in New York City are complex and are currently under review by the local legislature. It is the owner’s responsibility to be aware of such local laws and to stay compliant. HouseTrip cannot and does not check every property listed on the website but will investigate any specific report on non-compliance. 

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions, or there’s anything else I can do to assist. 

Best regards

Sarah Stotz 

Customer Care Assistant 

That was the response I received. (I actually sent the same email to HouseTrip.com twice, thinking the first had been deleted. I received two emails. Both with exactly the same response, the only difference being “Hello,” instead of “Dear” and the name of the “Customer Care Assistant”.)

For me, that email can be summed up as “Not our problem, Lolz” - which is why we won’t be using HouseTrip.com any time soon.

Oh, and I’ve yet to receive an reply from the appartment owner. That seems legit.

Today, HouseTrip.com emailed asking me to review their support, starting with “Good, I’m satisified” or “Bad, I’m unsatisfied.”

I clicked “Good, I’m satisfied” and it then allowed me to add a comment.

I appreciated the quick response and particularly appreciated the quality of the copy and paste work involved. It answered all my questions and confirmed that I won’t be using HouseTrip on this occasion.

I doubt anyone will read or reply to the comment I supplied, but oh well.

In short, I don’t trust HouseTrip.com and doubt I’ll ever use their services in the future.

Paris: Au revoir!

July 4th, 2011

The alarm went off at 5am. By 6:30 we were at Joinville-Le-Pont RER for the last time.

We got to Charles De Gaulle in good time, and so we sat for a bit before saying our goodbyes.

From Charles De Gaulle, I went to La Défense, to see the Grande Arche and ended up sitting there for a while utilizing a WiFi hotspot I found. The whole défense area is pretty nice, if you can see it through all the suits. On the train to La Défense, I was the only one in the carriage not suited up, by the end.

After, I headed to porte maillot, to find out the times of the bus and also buy a ticket. The metro stop is a lot bigger than I remember, but last time I was there, it was packed out with frustrated italians.

Once I had my ticket, I went to Musée De L’Armée, which was only €7. It was pretty cool and most importantly, killed a few hours… Oh, and while there, I managed to get myself another bloody nosebleed. Ended up wandering around half the 1900’s with a blood soaked tissue.

Paris, you have not been kind to my nose.

After that, I hung around the carousell de Louvre and used its many free WiFi locations, killing time until I got the bus.

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