One(1) star rating (given only for the daily afternoon birdsong in surrounding pohutakawa trees).
*****
The entire property is cluttered with personal affects with many items messily stuffed behind chairs, doors, windows and in cupboards.
The outside of the property to the front has been ill advertised (depicting clean lines, uncluttered well maintained home simple Birdseye view of a cleanline kitchen) is messy, unkempt, dirty and looks more like a lived in house than a welcoming holiday home. The surroundings are overgrown with a huge amount of debris around the accommodation. There is no outdoor seating or useable furniture.
...The rusty outdoor shower photographed on the holiday houses website doesn’t even work!
The very basics of the kitchen are insufficient and disappointing to accommodate paying guests.
The coffee plunger does not work and The small stove coffee maker has, what looks like, months worth of grey ‘slime mouldy wax like bacteria’ growing inside it. The perished food strainer, the overstocked Pantry bulging with the owners out-of-date food items along with multiple hanging utensils leaves no room for guests to place anything!
The kitchen drawers filled with stained tea towels, sit happily amongst dirty, dusty and fusty drawers and cupboards, gives no comfort to any culinary skills you may have, topped with overhanging cobwebs in all corners of the room!
Driving down the steep, unsealed potholed drive to the end of the three houses (careful to not have the overgrown branches scratch your vehicle), you walk down the wooden deck to enter the property (walking past full bins, full recycling box and shelves of old shoes and overfilled buckets of previous visitors shoes and shelves of random pieces of timber and hand held brushes) my eldest son said,
“Are you sure we’re in the right place? were they expecting us? It looks as if old people live here, and they've just popped out to take the dog for a walk...”
Indeed, have the owners ever looked at their property through the eyes of a paying guest? I don’t think so.
The lounge door glass windows opening onto the sea front view deck are left with a covering of sea spray and dirt, you can’t see through them to see the outside. Dirty and sticky items throughout the room and seating is a collection of old single use chairs and old thin squabs (covered with bed throws)ontop of wicker couches. Broken curtains swept behind the chairs, keep the mouldy bean bags and plastic beach items and dusty yoga mats company.
Dirt and dust under all furniture, the odd window and door latch broken, you find yourself surrounded by stuff! The hot under eaves bedrooms are small and the main bed, old and uncomfortable to sleep in, doesn’t allow gentle holiday lie-ins.
The downstairs living room has shelves upon shelves of books, old folded newspapers ready for the fireplace during the winter months (in 6 months time!) and ripped, unordered piles and piles of kids jigsaws and opened boardgames.
I won’t mention the ’shower room’ - that is a wooden laundry room surrounded with cheap plastic shower curtains, mouldy shower tray and washing machine to name a few. To shower in that room is most unpleasant.
The accommodation needs serious decluttering and removal of personal effects (how many wide brimmed straw hats does this house need to have on show? ...using up all the hooks?), cleaning and fixing the basics before the accommodation is ready for any paying guests to Tryphena.
I understand this property is their pride and joy, however, perhaps their love for the Island has overshowered the presentation and upkeep of this property.
I’d like to invite them to take a long hard look at their rental accommodation through the eyes of a paying guest and see what improvements they could make to make this place an inviting place to stay. Declutter, thoroughly clean and replace old furniture and furnishings with more comfortable aesthetics pleasing ones. Get the basics right.
The overhanging cobwebs in bedrooms and in the kitchen and general uncleanliness throughout the house does not encourage you to stay.
We appreciate this is Great Barrier Island and not suburbia, however as paying guests, with basic expectations our disappointment as paying guests of clean floors, welcoming entrance and uncluttered rooms is a small ask when you’re paying $240 per night.
My children and I regularly rent holiday accommodation overseas and up and down the country. I can honestly say, I have never seen any reason to write a bad review, email a complaint to the owner or involve the holiday letting company before now. I emailed Holiday Homes to request a change of accommodation but they replied unable to assist me. I emailed the owner with backup photographs and detailing our disappointment. I advised that we’d like to leave the property early and have the remaining money refunded. Owner Richard emailed a response ‘ I refute the allegation that you were misled by the photographs. Entirely untrue’.
Staying at this accommodation has completely ruined our Great Barrier Island experience.