Villa Siam/ Villa Julern in Koh Phangan, Thailand

Advertisement Fraud and very greedy

20th of Feb, 2012 by abebars

Here is a walkthrough to what has actually happened with all the details and you are most welcome to contact me for further info.

THREATENED AND SCAMMED BY THE OWNER, WORST DAY/NIGHT EVER, FIRST DAY ON OUR HONEYMOON TOTAL RUINED
OWNERS NAMES: David &Rosemary. Some websites say Romy.

We booked a 5 day stay for USD 1,064. USD 319 were transfered as a deposit and the remaining upon arrival. Before sales service was very good and even illustrated and emphasized what we wanted to hear and hid all other factors. We were even told things that didn't happen. Let me walk you through the details.
it's on an island 12-15 mins away with a speed boat. and the villa is 1 hours drive from the port. Bumpy road, but that's not the owners fault. The person managing the villa is the only advantage to the whole thing. He passed by a supermarket on our way to the villa to pick up some groceries. We arrived to the villa to find it well furnished the view was lovely, the manager asked for the remaining payment, so we paid him the whole stay upfront. The manager showed us around and he said shoes arent allowed indoors, we had no problem with that. Then he told us the electricity might go down and then you will have to go and turn the generator on, which is basically located literally under the villa. if you are at night and the electricity gone, good luck going there and maybe barging on a snakes party or sthg. I dont scare easily, but that was scary :). the villa is slightly lifted off the ground level so there is that area under the villa where you have to walk in with your back bent 90 degs. good luck if the electricity goes out at night, which happened to us, but thank god was sunset. after settling down, we realized that the villa doesnt have the privacy discussed prior to our arrival as they quoted "full seclusion with no line of sight from any passerby or neighbor". I stood only to realize that the bedroom bathroom is overlooked by the street, the other bathroom is totally exposed to the street. the villas main area ( kitchen, living room and swimming pool) have windows totally exposing the whole area, that I went and covered them by bed sheets to feel more private. Swimming pool was full of dead insects by its bed, water boiler was awfully dirty, corners weren’t clean and had dead insects as well. By sunset i had a spider twice the size of my fist "held wide open" walking 2-4 cms away from my head, which honestly freaked both my wife and I. we said ok we ll try and hunt it, but were only obstructed by another one of the same size but i believe a different kind. one was a little bit lighter in color and had less hair on him than the other one. By that time we were less disgusted by the 9 geckos in our room. We didnt know what kind of species are these spiders, hence we weren't really sure if they are harmful or not, might it be absurd or not the idea of having them in room wasn't very relaxing not pleasant. we were seated in TV room at that occurring and the bedroom was totally exposed and open to the nature, so we weren't sure what really got in there as well, so we decided to move the couch a little bit from the wall to avoid any weird night crawlers and was bumped to view even more insects dead down there and has been left for quite sometime. We were only warned of mosquitoes as the only visitor to the villa, which surely wasn't the case but do they find mosquitoes more freaky? We tried to reach the manager to handle this issue, but we couldn't get hold of him. Even the internet was down 98% of the whole day, we thankfully used it for an hour
A long night with lack of sleep passed till he kindly called back at around 9-10 am. We told him about the incident and how are things totally different from what we were told, we want to check out today and refund the remaining nights. The manager said I will have to check with the owner. The owner refused and said that's against the terms and conditions or whatever rules they have assigned. We said that's only applicable if you didn't say one thing and do another. anywayz, through the talk, I mentioned how could you prefer couple of dollars on top of reputation. Then an exploding bomb dropped me. He said: " if you are threatening, then I will make sure that your reputation is bad over the internet and he even mentioned an example of weird actions like covering the windows" if he had thought for a second, it was only to give me the privacy that he said was already there, surely wasn't. All contacts with the owner was through emails. His consistent threatening emails didn't stop till I messaged him that one more email from him will be my initiative to fire the case internationally. We even tried to reason with him of paying 2 nights and refunding the rest to make it fair, but he rejected any requests and after mentioning how would you top couple of hundred dollars on reputation he started bombarding my email with threats.
Furthermore on the owner, he owns like 2 websites specialized on actually making you look good with hints on how to enhance your google search results, that he actually mentions you could post about yourself to push unwanted reviews, posts, blogs, etc to another page, so did he do that on the Villa Siam as well, guess we will never know.
This rental made us think that our honeymoon was ruined before thankfully we ran into honest, welcoming professional people. Worst day and night EVER.
However, the manger is very helpful, I hope he finds a better owner to work with. We even forgot our hairdryer and my home cell phone sim card, and he sent it to us in our other staying location.
The Pictures Shall Preview a small segment of what I say, I hope it shows. Lucky for the owner I forgot to take a picture of the big vertical window over looking the neighboring road while seated on the toilet, how pleasant.