The host was difficult, he made our situation messy and impossible, he is NOT worth working with.
I contacted Jay because we had an end of life in the family, not expecting much the week of the rental. He said he could change the dates. Then the morning of the reservation he told me to just cancel, he would refund me, and we could reschedule.
I tried to cancel with VRBO, it wouldn’t let me because it was the day of, so I asked Jay to do it. He told me to “talk VRBO into” letting me cancel. I tried several ways, but they couldn’t because it was an active reservation. As a host, he knew this would happen. When I told him, he then said he wouldn’t do it on his end because VRBO would penalize him (VRBO assured me in the help chat this was not true and his fee would be waived).
I gullibly took him at his word, my mistake. He should have just told me from the start he wouldn’t do anything. When he told me he would help I cancelled my child care, trusting his offer. If he had been honest from the start that he wasn’t going to do anything, this could have been avoided.
But because he lied about helping and then didn’t communicate in a timely manner, I am simply out the money. Also, it was past 8:30pm Friday evening that he even gave me instructions on getting into the rental - over 4 hours late and I live in a different state!
100% it is not worth working with Jay. I also want to mention, he resorted to sarcasm and name calling when I called him out for not keeping his word.