VRBO review: Vacation rentals by owners

Booked a property in WPB FL Nov 2025 for stay during President's day weekend in Feb 2026.
Paid our deposits in full on time and continued to receive prompts from VRBO that we should be hearing soon from the Host about how to access the property. They day before still hadn't heard but figured it would be in our email the next morning. Instead, we received at 3AM, an email saying that our rental was canceled! We were to leave in 2 hours to fly 6 hrs from NE to FLA after waking to this alarming email. Called VRBO customer service with our reservation code and they brilliantly declared that the reservation was cancelled! We waited 30 minutes for that news as the poor customer service rep profusely apologized every time she got on and off the phone thereby wasting precious minutes instead of just IMMEDIATELY escalating our concerns. That took one hour and we had to then get on a plane and fly to where we had no place to stay after we arrived. Finally, a supervisor said OK we will refund your money and extra funds for you to rent another property-- well hard to do when flying, AND you have to wait 24-48 hours for anyone to get back to you. Any hotels had to be booked through hotels.com or direct. Holiday weekend last minute booking for decent hotels would have overextended even the budget they gave us. My sister in law was able to book a last minute ABnB for one night but VRBO explicitly stated they would not pay for anything booked through ABnB or other competitor. So, we are left with that expense. We finally were able to get two last minute hotel rooms through Hawthorne and although we were pleased with them-it was not at all the comfortable home environment with pool and spa and communal kitchen and living area that we would have had in our VRBO. On top of that, we ended up eating out more often- further adding to our expenses. Mix in the nail biting waits for alternative hosts to negatively respond to our rental requests, and just the increased stress when the vacation was for DESTRESS made the experience memorably terrible.
Now, I would be writing none of this if this was because of a natural disaster or unpredictable property problem. The fact of the matter is that VRBO made a great mistake in not informing us earlier (they had 3 months) that the rental had been removed from the market. No monetary compensation is worth it when you can't spend it to rent a comparable property.
We lived up to our end of the contract--they did not. We encourage all of you who have had similar experiences to report them independently-VRBO has refused to post ours because we mentioned ABNB and even when we edited will not post--it is similar to this posting. We, (along with the rest of our well-traveled family) needless to say, will not use VRBO again