“We felt the details for this property were very misleading.”
It was far from ‘immaculate’ as described, I would in fact summarise it as tired and grubby. Early on in our stay I went to the Yorkshire Coastal Cottages office to pick up a parking ticket and was a little embarrassed to mention that the property was rather grubby. The staff said they were surprised and disappointed to learn this and offered me a mid week clean. As I didn’t want to cause a fuss and as I initially believed their apology was genuine , I declined. My main intention was to make sure that the following weeks guests didn’t have to endure some of the things that we were. It was only when a member of our group subsequently checked on the reviews of the property in more detail that I realised that the letting agents could not possibly have been genuinely surprised as a string of reviews has told them how grubby the property is. The reassurance that they gave me about it being the last week of the cleaner and a new cleaner being installed for the following week was remarkably similar to the promise they have used for many of the reviews in the past 12 months. How very disappointing! To knowingly let out a property where the cleaning is substandard is clearly not acceptable. To do this week after week after many complaints is wilfully negligent and shows a complete lack of respect for the customer. I was told a member of staff was in the house showing a new cleaner around prior to our arrival. If this was true, why wasn’t the quality of cleaning actually checked? If they couldn’t guarantee a clean home, why keep the price of the rental at the original price? What we paid for did not match the description-the company are clearly mis-selling this property. For clarity of the future potential customers I will provide a summary of the positives and negatives of the property as we found it. Before I begin,I will again state that the letting agents have formally been made aware of ALL of the issues in many previous reviews. Exterior entrance vestibule. This was extremely grubby both on the walls windows and floor. One might anticipate some seagull fathers floating in to this space but the level of cobwebs and grime were well beyond that. As mentioned in other reviews this area was smelly and was full of flies. Perhaps the bins should be washed out periodically. We found ourselves holding our noses as we walked through this space. Interior vestibule. This was a pleasant space, great for storing buggies or bikes.The York stone flooring was very attractive. The plinth where the modem was stored was very dusty and was our first sign of things to come. Laundry cupboard -a very dirty,cob web filled space which contained a washing machine and tumble dryer. Buckets and spades and a few games were in this space too but were hard to access initially as all of the cleaning products appeared to have been thrown onto the floor of this space leaving us unable to step inside until we did a bit of rearranging. This was a minor irritation but nothing that caused this too much concern. Upstairs bathroom. At some point in its history, this room has been rather nicely decorated. Unfortunately by our arrival it appeared to be very tired and unloved. There are clearly ventilation issues as the shower grouting had patches of black mildew and the metal sink which supported the glass bowl was covered in rust. There was plenty of dust, spiderwebs and 8 legged friends to be found in this room. Main lounge area – I think the best way to describe this room would be that it was functional. It was a no frills room as we had anticipated but It is true that there is a very good view of the harbour and of the abbey. The windows were rather grubby but that didn’t concern us too much. Kitchen - this was actually quite well equipped. The crockery, cutlery, pans and glassware was all fine. Markings on the oven had clearly worn off , the barely visible masking tape instructions on its face were difficult to decipher but al least someone had tried! The tiled backsplash and cooker hood were greasy. A little unappealing! Bedroom 1 - this was a large space and looked promising. Unfortunately we soon became aware of yet more cleaning issues. Imagine our surprise when we opened the drawers by the side of the bed to find old tracksuit bottoms, dirty socks and a used tissue! On closer inspection the floors were very dirty at the edges. I could almost believe this room had not been hoovered or swept. On the plus side, the bedding and towels were very white and looked fresh. As we settled down to bed in the evening we were rather unimpressed by the many cobwebs that fluttered all around the edges of the ceiling in every part of the room. When I reached down to plug in my phone I had to push aside many cobwebs. As I got out of bed the next day, my stomach rather turned as I put my hand on the bed head to discover it was absolutely thick with dust. In times of Covid this was not reassuring! We found the bed rather small and soft but do understand that this is a matter of personal preference. Bedroom 2 -We needed to use this space as a double room so when we moved the beds across we were rather appalled to see the grime and detritus that lay on the floor underneath. This room was clearly in need of a deeper clean too because as we hoovered this detritus up, it appeared to be rather stuck to the floor.On a practical note, access to plugs in this room would have been a little tricky had we not moved the beds. This was a very small room but was functional if you ignored the dust and cobwebs. Bathroom-The main sink in this room was dirty on arrival. The mirror light still does not work despite assurances in a previous review from the company that they had fixed it. On a plus note the shower was nice and powerful. ‘Terrace’ -We had imagined when we booked this property that would be able to return from town and sit on the terrace with our family enjoying a nice evening drink. The tempting description of this outside space and the photo was our main reason for booking this property. What we found in reality was that this space was very limited. It is paved but the whole area is probably less than a metre and a half wide. I’m not sure if cleaning of the furniture was part of the weekly brief but when we arrived the chairs were covered in bird poo. Again you might expect some accidents from seagulls during the week but not as you first walk in. ( Fortunately some rain on the final day may have helped clean the furniture this week) Whereas we had imagined being able to sit around a little table, we couldn’t in fact arrange the chairs in anything other than a single curved line if we wanted to sit out there. Some large weeds bought a welcome bit of greenery to this joyless area but did not really add much to the ambience. It all felt very unloved, rather like the rest of the property. We chose not to sit in this area once over the week despite some nice weather. Sadly, this property felt unloved, grubby and tired, and was far from ‘immaculate’ as was promised in the description. There is a clear discrepancy here and I welcome further interaction with the letting company as I believe, given their failure to address the basic issues many customers have repeatedly mentioned, we were mis-sold this accommodation. I have photos of some of the areas of concern should they be needed. It is so sad to have to write this but someone needs to take ownership of the issues here. I had hoped that a quiet,private word would have been enough and I probably would not have written had I not realised that I had been lied to. Fobbing off the customers with empty apologies and promises is not acceptable and so disappointing.
Thank you for your feedback we welcome feedback good or bad. We are disappointed that our normal level of cleaning was not maintained, we have had a few problems but appreciate that our normal high standards were not met in this instance and we have just changed our cleaners with a view to remedy this. We are sorry upon raising your concerns you did not allow us to undertake a mid week clean which would have remedied the cleanliness related issues.
We will endevour to sort out the laundry cupboard to make it more accessable, unfortunetely with all the covid rules things have to be done a lot different and such items can't be left out.
Property Owner
