So dear reader (apologies, I went all Bridgerton then), we left you with me face-to-face with a rather wet gentleman in the kitchen who revealed that this property was in fact his house and that he lived here, and he was not expecting houseguests for the next fortnight.

Again, to protect the innocent, I will call this gentleman Trevor. Trevor seemed as shocked by our arrival as we were by his appearance. There was a lot of pacing about as he tried to explain exactly what had happened, but this is a potted account (we think).

Trevor moved out here in about 1979 (oh yeah, you are getting the FULL back story) and began building the property (there are photos on the wall of this and judging by the age of the car, it’s definitely the late 70’s/early 80’s).   For over 10 years, he let the property himself via Vrbo. So, he was responsible for taking the bookings, meeting and greeting the guests, and even doing the laundry, as he didn’t trust the locals to return it in time. He’s recently turned 71 and decided enough was enough, and he’s planning on selling the place and moving back to the UK.  To make life easier, he employed an agent to look after all the bookings. This is, of course, the infamous Pedro.

However, recently this relationship has somewhat soured as the latest couple of bookings via Pedro have not been successful ones, which have resulted in the place nearly being trashed as well as used for illicit drug use.   Trevor decided enough was enough so several weeks ago, contacted Pedro and said he didn’t want any more bookings with him and to cancel anything which he already had.

On hearing this, our first instinct was that Pedro had obviously not passed this rather important piece of information on, hence this slightly dripping pensioner now had 5 distraught looking middle-aged people in his kitchen, with 3 three suitcases, one now emitting quite a potent odour due to its contents having now been out of the fridge for over 12 hours.

After Trevor had told us this tale of woe, the rest of the gang headed out to regroup. Rach appeared to be struck with a touch of the vapours, and was sitting outside being consoled by Tibu, whilst Nikki quietly began plan B, searching for other suitable accommodation which may still be available in case Karen and I could not resolve the matter with King Neptune.

The sort of good news was that Trevor also owned the house over the road, and when he let this house out, he moved over there. You could see he was so distraught by what was happening to us and said, “Don’t worry, you will have a bed for the night. I will move out into the other place, and you can stay here”.

We then contacted Booking.com to find out what had happened, and it turned out that it was their fault, as when they looked at their records, they did know about the cancellation, and in fact it was they who hadn’t told us, not Pedro not telling them.

Trevor said that he was happy us to rent the villa, but we must make sure that we get the money back from Booking.com. To their credit (I use the word ‘credit’ loosely), they immediately said that they would contact the owner to see if he was still amenable to us staying there. I did explain that the owner was standing directly in front of us in his Speedos, but the Booking.com representative explained that they had to follow the correct procedure, and he would contact him. The penny then dropped that he was going to ring Pedro, not Trevor, as Trevor had no dealings with Booking.com. Well, that was going to be an interesting conversation, assuming Pedro actually picked up his phone.

As we were on the phone, Trevor was busy in the kitchen, offering us cups of tea, glasses of water, and beer, anything to try to steady our nerves. We said that was okay, at which point I think that Trevor realised that he was still standing there in just his swimming costume, and so said, “I’ll just go and put some clothes on”.

Booking.com stated that if we couldn’t stay here, they would cancel the booking and find us an alternative, better property.  If it were more expensive, they would pay the difference. They said they would get back to us within 45 minutes…but funnily enough, they didn’t.

Of course, the other problem was that because he wasn’t expecting guests, the house wasn’t exactly guest-ready. As he put it “the house is clean, but it’s man clean”. Luckily, his cleaner lives two doors down, and so he said he would arrange for her to come in the next day to get the place as he would like it to be for his guests.

So, with a sort of plan in place, we agreed that we would take a trip to the supermarket, not to do the big shop, but to do a little shop to tide us through the rest of the day and evening, and Trevor would start to pack for his long journey down the drive and over the road.

On our return an hour or so later, another call to Booking.com confirmed that they would reimburse our entire fee within a few days, meaning that we could simply pay that to Trevor directly, as if the last few hours had never happened. I was quite impressed by how quickly we struck up this agreement, especially as one party was wearing a pair of budgie smugglers at the time.

So, we had an interesting first day to this holiday. A plane that needed jump-starting, a car that required a contortionist to get all the bags in, and a slightly cobbled-together arrangement with renting the villa.

But the highlight of the day had to be when Trevor said, “It was lucky you didn’t arrive 5 minutes earlier as I was stark b****** naked in the pool having a swim”.  Never have I been so happy that I was a bit dim-witted about trying the gate.

Epilogue

This bit is not funny (some may say that the bit above this wasn’t funny either), but there is a wonderful coda to this whole story. When we checked back into the Booking.com app after getting the full story from Trevor and Booking.com admitting they had made a mistake, we received this message from Pedro, which I have copied and pasted below.

“Really sorry, we have a big problem with cockroaches, the house is infected and we are trying to solved, we fumigated few times this week and yesterday looks that was solved but i just get into the house and i found a lot .

Apologize about this but we have to cancel the reservation because is not healthy for nobody.

We just want the best for you, really sorry for the inconvenient in your holidays🙏”

Piecing together the timeline, when we were conversing with Pedro about dropping cases off and gaining access to the villa, he knew that it had been cancelled. This explains why on the day of arrival, he never picked up the phone for us. But then to actually have the audacity to lie to us and say that the booking was cancelled due to cockroaches was staggering.

If he had just confessed that it was cancelled, we could have made alternative arrangements.   If any of my Morning Live or Watchdog colleagues are reading this and would like more details of the agency involved, please do contact me!