Pacific Palms Holidays — Local services in Blueys Beach

My family and I booked 'Tawarri' through PP Holidays and had the worst experience that we have ever had with a rented house. I very strongly suggest that if you are considering booking a holiday rental with this company, or doing any other property business with them, that you do not got ahead if you can possibly avoid it.

We had a number of problems with the house, but to try to keep this short the main problem was that in two of the four bedrooms the beds were totally 'unsleepable'.

In one of these bedrooms the two single beds had dirty, thin, old and disgusting mattresses (they must have been over 25 years old) that were resting on a metal mesh. The mattresses were extremely 'jabby' and you could feel every spring just by pushing lightly on them, let alone lying down on one. And the only way I can describe the base is that they looked like what you'd expect to see in a prison c. 30 years ago - with a metal mesh attached to the metal frame with springs and with no support to it whatsoever.

In the other awful bedroom the setup wasn't quite as bad (I don't think anything could be!), but the mattress was clearly very, very old and tired and had very little support from the frame either. My husband and I tried to sleep on this bed for 3 nights and both of us barely slept for 3 nights. We would just keep waking up every 30 minutes or so having rolled into each other!

We tried for 3 days to get PPH to do something about this, and to come up to the house (a 5 minute walk from their office), but they kept telling us they were waiting for the owners to reply to them. They told us the owners were overseas and hard to get ahold of. Meanwhile, half of our family was barely sleeping every night, which is not what you want on a holiday when you've paid a lot for the house to make it a special week.

Each day for 3 days PP Holidays told us they would come up to the house to take a look, and to talk to us, and each day passed and they didn't come up. We had to start chasing them over the phone and, as this was just getting so unacceptable and was ruining our holiday, my mother became more firm with them and my husband went into their office to show them photos and videos of the beds given that they wouldn't come up to see how very, very bad they were in person.

Perhaps the owner was the issue here. PP Holidays told us they were not replying to them and then when my husband went in to their office they told us the owners had refused to allow them do anything with the beds as 'they have family to stay in the house and everyone has been happy sleeping on them' - but we will never know. But the way it was handled by PPH was awful.

And just to pre-empt what might get written as a response here by the Owner, a few other points to make about our experience:

after three days of not taking 15 minutes to come up to see things and to talk to us PPH started telling us 'they didn't feel safe coming to the house given how aggressive my mother and my husband were'!

when shown the videos of the 1970's style prison beds with extremely dirty and old mattresses, we were told that 'some people like beds like that' and 'everyone has a different idea of what a good bed is'

my husband was asked by (we think) the owner if he was 'a bit slow' as he 'wasn't understanding what they kept telling him'. Unfortunately what they 'kept telling us' was that the beds were fine and they weren't going to do anything about them so of course after 3 days of barely sleeping we were understandably not going to agree with that!

a brief summary (this is far too long already!) of the other issues: two big rugs were filthy, the dishwasher didn't work properly and the fridge wouldn't go below 11 degrees (we brought a lot of meat along from our restaurant that was wasted). To be fair to PPH they got someone out to look at the appliances, although those people told us dishwashers aren't for cleaning, you should just put fully clean dishes in to sanitise and that the fridge was fine (we put a thermometer in to prove it wasn't and they then...

I am sharing an objective review of one particular house we stayed in August 2020; The Headlands House

I’ll start with the positives:

The bedrooms and beds were clean and lovely to sleep in. The main positive is that the staff were very friendly and accomodating when we spoke to them before our stay, always willing to answer a question.

The view from the balcony is absolutely beautiful. It’s very relaxing when you’re sitting out there. The bar table setup is also great and the sunlight through the house is lovely. In fact the location is that great that it distracts the occupants from the terrible and very low quality state of the house... And this leads me to the negatives. Do not book in the Headlands House until these things are guaranteed and checked:

We were so disappointed by the lack of basic things in the house- the reply from staff was that it’s corona time which if you see what was provided in the house, they might as well have said “empty bathroom and kitchen”. We paid $600 a night to not have enough toilet paper, no salt or pepper, no tea, no tea towels and paper towels in the kitchen. The appliances in the kitchen are so old and unclean- it’s an embarrassment to the house. The state of the water pipes in the kitchen also need to be checked- the tap water is near undrinkable. We are not precious people but the taste was terrible. We had to boil all our water before drinking it or buy bottled water. The staff reply to this was that unfortunately its how the towns water is and to bring bottled water.

I had to take photos of things that were falling apart in case any issues arose after. The balcony wood has severe water damage that we hoped it had been checked. Another big negative is that there is no lock on the main bathroom door, I don’t need to explain how bad that is. Thank goodness there was one on the shower room door. There were a number of things that the owner clearly hadn’t thought through or the staff hadn’t checked.

Pacific Palms have responded however we are not satisfied with their rectification of the experience. They said we should have contacted them during the stay but that’s a poor excuse and a way to push the onus on us. We made the most of the stay and dealt...

I recently stayed at Seashells House (November 2020) (58 Patsys Flat Road, Smiths Lake, NSW, 2428) which was booked through Pacific Palms Holidays. I was very disappointed with the state of the house, dirty carpets, rooms were misleading (very separated and inconvenient), bottom rumpus room smelled like mold, lack of any amenities on site and BBQ was very dirty and old. We were told we needed to bring our own sheets, towels etc but doona would be provided. The doonas were not washed, and very gross. Had we known this we would have brought our own.

The house holds 11 guests, and in the middle of cooking dinner at 6:30pm, we were given a noise complaint by the local security guard. It was very unfortunate given we were all excited to enjoy the view and use the bbq which is located outside of the kitchen area in an open space with lack of privacy (neighbors staring in). The house is in a great location but for the price and all the above mentioned issues is not worth it.

Also it wasn't until the day prior to check in that I was sent a massive long text saying if we got any noise complaints we would be charged an additional $500 per complaint. This made us feel on edge the entire time, so much so that we were afraid to even use the fire pit because of our voices potentially carrying to the local neighbors. Had I known that there was going to be so many issues I would have not booked this place. I highly recommend Smiths Lake area and Myall Lake but encourage people to not stay in the Smiths Lake neighborhood or rent through Pacific Palms Holiday as it's very wrongly run and this area is not suited for larger groups looking to enjoy fresh air...