John Hou

Dec 26, 2021

Turnkey ruined my family'x Xmas vacation

I booked a room for my family at the Resort at Squaw Creek in the Lake Tahoe area over the Xmas holiday. One day before check-in, Turnkey cancelled my reservation. Apparently, they allowed the owner of the property to cancel my reservation at the last minute. Turnkey offered no substitute accommodations. I had to cancel my vacation and take my family back home. Before renting from Turnkey, read the fine print in their contract: they have full discretion to cancel your reservation at any time for any (or no) reason, with no advance warning, and with no recourse to you. You make a binding commitment to them -- if you cancel outside of their cancellation window, you must pay them -- but they make absolutely no commitment to you. If you're lucky, they will honor the reservation. But if you're unlucky, you might show up to the property like I did, only to discover that they cancelled your reservation at the last minute and left you in the lurch. And when you ask them for help, they might point you to the legalese in their contract -- as they did to me -- to remind you that they didn't actually promise you anything, and that they owe you nothing. Renters beware. UPDATE: In their reply below, Turnkey suggests that there was nothing they could have done differently. This is clearly untrue. When I asked their agent to help me find another room in the area, she told me that she could only search the handful of properties managed by Turnkey, and that she would not look for non-Turnkey properties. Apparently, "everything in our power" does not include doing a search on Expedia. I've since tried to understand why Turnkey wouldn't be willing to exert such minimal effort to help a renter they just cancelled on at the last minute, and I think I figured it out. It helps to understand how Turnkey's business model differs from that of a hotel. With a hotel, the room is the product, and you (the guest) are the customer. The hotel has some level of natural incentive to keep you, their customer, happy. But with Turnkey, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT, NOT THE CUSTOMER. Turnkey's customer is the property owner -- that's who they make money from -- and renters are the products that Turnkey sells to its owner-customers. If there is a conflict between the interests of the owner and those of the renter, their incentive will almost always be to favor the owner. If the owner wants to cancel a reservation at the last minute and ruin the renter's vacation, the decision isn't even a difficult one: the customer wins, the product loses. So when viewed through a cold business lens, Turnkey's unwillingness to go on Expedia and look for a non-Turnkey room to help me actually makes sense. I was the product. Why would a business spend time and money to help the product? If I ever use VRBO again, I will make sure to rent from a host that is an owner rather than a management company like Turnkey. When you rent directly from an owner, you regain your position as the customer. That's not to say that you won't be screwed, but your chances of having your family vacation ruined by a last-minute cancellation should theoretically be much lower when you are the customer rather than the product.