Parkside Cabin Rentals — Local services in Gatlinburg

BYOH&E - Bring your own coat hangers and electrician!

Pro Absolutely gorgeous setting Well-equipped kitchen Great guys at check-in free parking in Gatlinburg

Con Not one single coat hanger slight smell of mildew appx 50% of the outlets were defective floors uneven

Late afternoon check-in was a breeze. Jeff and Dustin were working the check-in office. Both were pleasant and informative. After dinner in Gatlinburg, we made it to the cabin. Although it was dark, there were outside lights that had been left on making it easy for us to find our way in. The cabin is at the end of a gravel road nestled in the trees. Very secluded.

Breakfast was more of a challenge than we anticipated. The toaster would not stay down/engaged. We ended up making toast in a skillet. There was sufficient dishware, flatware, and glassware for the six of us. The can opener was broken. We bought can opener at Dollar General and left it when we left. The pots and pans were in fairly good shape.

UNADDRESSED SAFETY ISSUE: About 50% of the outlets in the cabin were defective, meaning they would not hold a plug sufficiently. The plugs would either fall out or sag so that the metal prongs were somewhat exposed. I requested that they be repaired but nothing was done about it. Sometimes, it was both the top and the bottom outlet; sometimes it was just one or the other. When my adult son tried to plug in the toaster it sparked because it was so loose. I reported it to the main office, but there was no repair made while we were there.

There is not a single closet in the cabin and only the downstairs bedroom had a chest of drawers. The downstairs bedroom and bathroom had rods that shirts or pants folded over hangers could be hung on IF there had been hangers.

The floors were so uneven that initially it felt as if you were tipsy and staggering. We eventually got accustomed to it.

There is ZERO insulation between the first floor and the second floor bedrooms. You can hear every word that it said! Fortunately, the bathroom ceiling is insulated.

The downstairs bedroom has a faint odor of mildew that was unpleasant. I asked that the throw across the foot of the bed be removed because I thought that is where the smell was coming from. But, the smell was still there even after the throw was gone.

The labels on the hot tub buttons are so worn off that my son, who has a hot tub, had to guess at which button did what. The office, while nice, was unable to clearly address the issue by phone.

That’s the bad. Here’s the good.

The washer and dryer were a single stacking unit. Small but sufficient for our needs (washing wet clothes after the kids played in the creek).

The back porch is huge with a really big fireplace. S’mores every night! (Less than a mile away, Donna Jo’s on Hwy 321 has s’mores fixings). There is a large table on the porch with 4 chairs. It would have been nice to have 2 more chairs. The rocking chairs were comfortable and relaxing.

The creek was great fun for the kids to play in. Bring extra shoes that can get wet.

Even though the road to the property is gravel, the driveway from the road to the house is blacktop and well maintained.

Overall, it was a great experience and we would stay there again, provided we were assured the issues with the electrical outlets had...

There were ups and downs in our experience at the Cub’s Den. We really liked the Jacuzzi tub, that was honestly the best part. The worst part of the stay was the SPIDER issues we had, and the disappointing effort by the management to rectify our complaints. On the first night in our cabin, I killed 17 spiders (15 daddy longlegs and 2 brown spiders) that were already inside the cabin upon our arrival. (For the record: I understand that this was a cabin in the woods, and I can understand maybe 1-2 spiders getting into the cabin over time. However, 17 was EXCESSIVE.) We didn't keep the door open and invite them in. They were deep in the cabin in well established webs across the ceiling, in the corners of the rooms in the shower, in the Jacuzzi tub - two of which were across the headboard of the bed. This, of course, made it very unsettling to sleep in. My partner has a horrible fear of spiders, so this really put a damper on his experience overall. We honestly couldn’t believe that housekeeping didn’t make any apparent effort to get rid of them prior to us checking in. The most disappointing part was that when we drove down to the front office to express our frustration with management, their solution was to send out pest control ... after we had already killed all the spiders we found? This didn't make sense to us as an appropriate solution.

Other complaints with the property are as follows: Found dead flies in the Jacuzzi There were inches of dust on the fixtures, lamps and ceiling fans - like it hadn’t been cleaned for weeks The MASSIVE spider webs with large black spiders in them across the hot tub lid and the surrounding hot tub area made us too fearful to even go near the tub, let alone consider getting in. This was a HUGE bummer. There were rings of dirt in the toilet bowl upon arrival, again almost as if no one had stayed there in a while but no one had thought to clean up beforehand The bed squeaks SO LOUDLY that it wakes you from a dead sleep. This was very frustrating and led to some truly terrible sleep. Many of the dishes in the cabinets upon our arrival were not clean (I don't mean dusty, I mean stained and containing food residue on the dishes). They did provide soap for us to wash them with, but it was sort of gross knowing they'd been sitting in the cabinet dirty. After finding spiders behind the bed, I took the pillowcases off the pillows to check for spiders in them. There were some suspicious dark brown stains on the pillows. This was somewhat unsettling - but also it's a cabin rental, so I sort of get it?

Overall, there can only be two assumptions made: either the housekeeping team is not doing a thorough and proper job, or the cabin hadn't been rented for some time before our stay and was not appropriately seen to prior to our visit. For how the place is advertised and for the rate we paid, we definitely didn't expect such dirty and unkept conditions. Combined with the management team's minimal effort to rectify our experience, I can say with certainty that we won't be back, and we won't be recommending this company to...

Beauty with a side of bed bugs and roaches. Despite everything, we ended up getting all our money back only after the exterminator confirmed the infestation. They originally offered to only give us back money for the night we noticed the bed bugs and roaches.

So here is what happened: We stayed in the Little Pigeon River Cabin for 3 nights. I always thoroughly inspect our places for bugs and critters, but this time I was distracted with my young kids and forgot. On the 3rd and last night, I went to check on my kids and found a roach right next to them in the bed which prompted me to go to my room and check for other critters…much to my dismay, I found a dead bed bug right where I was sleeping. It was so tiny it looked like lint until I squished it and blood came out. I couldn’t sleep at all and started doing laundry and drying everything and loading all our stuff into trash bags. The next morning, there was blood droppings all over the kids bed. Since gatlinburg wasn’t our final stop on our road trip, we had to pit stop to buy zip lock bags and more trash bags and tape to quarantine all our luggage. We lived out of trash bags and sealed bags for the remainder of our vacation.

That isn’t all though: The first night there I was jolted awake by someone knocking on the master bedroom door. I thought I dreamed it until I heard 2 more knocks. My husband didn’t believe me until the next morning when we went down to the river and found trash bags full of beer and food and beer cans that weren’t there the night before.

We also didn’t have Wi-Fi for a full day.

For the remainder of our vacation, every day we came home, stripped at the door, put everything in the laundry and showered with 2 young children. The nights were exhausting and the mental anguish is the worst part of this entire experience. I’ve had night sweats every night and have barely slept. I went through all of this to prevent spreading them anywhere.

The only reason our car isn’t infested is because temperatures were near 100 every day. I purchased a zapper machine to heat everything when we get home, but I will never look at bug bites the same way again. This will always haunt me. And the worst part, the bites didn’t show up until 3 days after leaving the cabin because bed bugs bites can be very delayed. I’m thankful to the roach for prompting my paranoid recheck of everything so I didn’t bring them home or to our next destination.

This is not a problem you...