Outdoorsy — Attraction in Austin

Editing after company response. Their response addresses nothing. Every part of their system is designed so they have complete protection from anything bad that happens and you have none. They don’t care about camping or RV life. RVs just happened to be an unfilled market niche they could exploit for money and greed. And they are eagerly exploiting YOU, like slobbering, filthy pigs rutting during breeding season.

Second edit: the evidence of violation of terms of service and the poorly prepared camper was so strong my credit card company refunded all $900 of the charges within 24 hours of sharing the evidence with them. And they only stood to lose money by doing that! But they are a great company, immediately saw how wrong it was, and refunded it all!

3rd edit: I am not just complaining. Read all my other Google reviews. I leave balanced reviews, good and bad.

I can’t overstate how much you will be treated like trash. DON’T DO IT. READ THE ONE STAR REVIEWS and BBB complaints. You need to operate as if they are all true. YOU WILL GET SCREWED. I have photo, video, text, and email evidence the owner I rented from violated the outdoorsy contract, lied under oath during arbitration about the violation, and that their violation resulted in us returning the camper early and being unable to use the camper with any semblance of the terms of the contract. Propane was empty, gaskets were missing from hoses, we couldn’t get hot water, we couldn’t get heat, the water filter was inoperable (which, in our circumstance, meant we didn’t have access to clean water), the tongue jack was malfunctioning requiring us to use a stump and truck jack, and half a dozen other issues with general disrepair. We spent hours and hours troubleshooting the camper. I called outdoorsy many times while it was happening and provided the evidence to outdoorsy the day after I returned the camper. they refused to support me. I had a completely ruined spring break because of clearly documented and admitted neglect by the owner but outdoorsy didn’t want to lose money so they came up with a ingenious solution that allows them to deflect their accountability to their insurance company. Oh, you HAVE to buy insurance from them in order to rent. Oh, and outdoorsy refuses to communicate with their own insurance company (also have email evidence of this) so YOU have to be the intermediary. You should also look on BBB for how often Outdoorsy’s insurance company denies claims. It is FREQUENT. Guessing it is all part of the effort to defraud you. But the great part is that if they deny your claim, it goes to an arbitration company that is paid by outdoorsy!!! I wonder how that arbitration company will decide! You guessed it. In the only way that doesn’t hurt outdoorsy! I have ABUNDANT evidence of the arbitrator violating the California standard of ethics they are bound by. He lied, made up words I said, used double standards to judge, and more! So if you rent from outdoorsy, be ready to get screwed! The customer service agent for the arbitration company, in writing, said to me “the judges are too busy and won’t have time to review the details of your case” .

You can see my Google ID in this review. To email me it is my name @ gmail. Email me, and I will send you all the evidence. I will send you all of Outdoorsy’s responses, the final decision by the arbitrator, the evidence the arbitrator lied and acted unethically, the decision by the insurance company, all my pictures and video, literally everything. You can come to your own conclusion.

Outdoorsy is not profitable without forced insurance sales. And combine that with an outsized number of claim denials? And combine that with a convenient excuse to not speak to you? It is a brilliant system honestly. Genius. Dr. Evil is somewhere raising a toast to outdoorsy.

Yes, they occasionally, though a fluke, get something right. But the chance of a one star experience is too high and too impactful for...

Today is 7/30/24 and I am still dealing w/ a bogus claim from 7/4 (26 days so far) We have wasted countless hours

We had an RV delivered & set up to make things easy this time. We paid about $400 (in addition to rental, insurance, and Outdoorsy fees). During our rental over the 4th of July, the power cord + surge protector failed, resulting in a smoking, melted plug. We had no power, no A/C, and we are in Texas in the middle of Summer. To our surprise, the the owner filed a damage claim against us which resulted in many headaches and countless hours of wasted time-with no real help from Outdoorsy. In fact, whenever I call, I can only speak with someone in the PHILIPPINES-never the same person, no last name. Sometimes someone responds via email, but no call back. Always a promise to escalate, but no follow-through.

We purchased the stationary insurance (excess insurance), which we learned that they defer to YOUR PERSONAL AUTO POLICY FIRST. When I went back, I eventually found this in the fine print, but had to click through several pages and links to get to-essentially a rabbit hole. After the owner was told by our insurance company that this was not a qualified claim (and subsequently denied), he then pursued it with the Outdoorsy stationary policy-which was also denied. He told our insurance company that he would pursue it through the security deposit. They then emailed to ask us to approve a charge of $400-to pay for their faulty equipment-even after 2 denials stating that we were not responsible for their equipment failing. We declined.

We cannot get anyone at Outdoorsy to help us with this, though we have reached out via phone and email multiple times. Today we learned that Outdoorsy has charged our card for ANOTHER $750-the original amount of our deposit. After another call and another request to escalate-they are telling us that they have released it. I have yet to confirm that with my CC company, but will need to make sure that all future attempts to charge us will be denied.

Side notes: 1) Stationary/excess policy-they also add an additional charge for roadside assistance-which you should not need if you are not towing the vehicle. In fact, the policy becomes null and void if you move the camper for any reason on a stationary policy. 2) When filling out claim info, you answer questions in a form online and submit. You do not get a copy of this form and they will not send you a copy of your answers or the info provided by the other person in the dispute. I copied/pasted my answers into a file prior to submitting. You can only submit 2 photos through the form. Of course you can email them, but to who? 'Kev. E'?

We would never even think of trusting Outdoorsy again-it's really just a platform, taking a cut, and cheaply outsourcing their customer service.

There is no protection and no one to call who can do...

This was our first time using Outdoorsy and unfortunately we will not be returning customers. The bottom line is that when things started to go south, Outdoorsy tried to protect their own interest at all cost rather than make things right promptly and make it possible for us to save our weekend camping plans.

We booked a camper for a weekend trip and three days before our departure we reached out to the host to ask some questions and make plans for the key exchange and did not hear back. We wrote to them twice more the two days leading up to the reservation and still did not hear back. The evening before our reservation we reached out to Outdoorsy to ask for help getting ahold of the host because we were scrambling a bit to figure out what we would do if we didn't hear from them and customer service said they would attempt to contact them and if we still did not hear back by the morning of our reservation to reach back out. So the morning of our reservation I reached back out to customer support because we still had heard nothing and they said they still could not cancel the reservation yet and we needed to wait and see if we heard back until 12:00pm (which is when we were hoping to depart by). We never heard back and Outdoorsy did cancel the reservation and issue a refund at 12:00 but we were disappointed that they made us wait until the very last second on the day of our planned trip to make things right. This made it very hard to make other accommodations because we did not want to pay for anything else until we knew we would get a refund. It felt a lot like the big company protecting the $50-$100 they would have gotten out of the reservation rather than acknowledging the stress of our situation and working to make things right for us in time to save our camping plans. It just makes me sad when big companies make you jump through hoops when things start to go south. I realize there is risk with renting from another person and had customer support been more eager to help us and fix the situation when we first asked I would be inclined to give it another try and chalk it up to bad luck. But when the company isn't willing to make an effort when their service fails and ruins your planned vacation that just isn't right. If you plan to use Outdoorsy I would recommend getting in contact with the host and making all arrangements prior to booking to avoid what we went through. The other unfortunate thing is that even after Outdoorsy themselves said they were unable to contact the host, her listing is still active so this could happen to the next person who tried to book this camper too and they would have no way of knowing because I cannot leave a review without having completed the...