Mammoth Rental by Owner

I would ardently not recommend the parent company of Mammoth Rental by Owner, Nomadness Rentals, for any future vacation rental. In our specific case, if you are the owner of #1014 in Steamboat / Fish Creek Falls, please consider working with a different company. I am one who will consciously avoid working with Nomadness in all locations and future travel plans. Short version of this review is this. I just finished a very disappointing experience with the management company Nomadness Rentals who exercised zero flexibility in light of Covid related travel restrictions. Ultimately, we paid over $1,300 for a rental we canceled a generous 5 months before our travel dates in December, due to safety concerns in general and specific to our family. We were especially incensed when we learned that Nomadness fully still rented the property during the dates we had cancelled. In essence, money was made twice for the same dates. My short but impassioned recommendation to future customers is to avoid unnecessary financial risk, and book with a company that is less opaque and more ethical about their cancellation policy. If interested, the more detailed account of the transaction is this. • Nomadness has a policy that there is an initial 30% cancellation fee if cancelled more than 14 days prior to travel dates. If the unit is rebooked, the balance of the 30% “less fees incurred by the owner” is returned. Common sense might suggest “what possible fees could have been incurred by an internet transaction made and canceled more than 5 months before?” What is not clear is that the “fees incurred by the owner” are significant, meaning Nomadness charges the “owner” a sizeable amount just to make the reservation, and this amount gets covered by nearly all of the 30% paid by the customer. So, even though the property was successfully rebooked, my refund was a paltry $124 of the 30%. Simply stated, Nomadness makes a great deal of money duping people who assume “fees to owner” must be a reasonable amount. “Charging the owners more” but in reality just covering it with customer deposits, while not being explicit about the nature and extent of fees is definitely self-dealing, certainly misleading, borderline dishonest and likely pretty lucrative for Nomadness. • Nomadness is a business, and I suspect a pretty successful one. I spoke to several of their staff and they really stick to the standard script. The “cold hard truth” is that Nomadness views the travel insurance option, in the ballpark of a 10% upcharge, as the only mechanism to breech a “contract” for a rental. In their view, public health concerns for the parties involved, or anyone else for that matter, do not warrant an exception. The argument is that to cover their expenses, they need to allocate some costs to rentals / transactions that do not materialize. Conceptually, I can understand some cost to cancel, but not close to 30% of the full rental costs. Might I urge the finance team re consider their allocation methodology? Or, I fear the opposite. Making money off of cancellations where folks get duped like we did keeps the cost of successful rentals down, property owners happy and the owners of Nomadness as shrewd as Ebenezer Scrooge. I get it and it’s really disappointing. • Before accepting defeat, my final plea with Nomadness was to request a credit for a future rental with Nomadness. I asked for this not to break policy, but as a response to “doing the right thing in an unprecedented pandemic,” a business decision to save a relationship with future customers. My request was coldly denied. Steamboat remains on our bucket list and I look forward to spending money on a property in Steamboat not managed by Nomadness. Personally, it’s time to move one. My family did the right thing in cancelling our vacation. Our $1,300 helped to pay some salaries and some other potentially real / overhead costs incurred by Nomadness, but also enriched the owners of Nomadness, and maybe helped them in a down year. Karma wise, I think Nomadness is on the wrong side of history in terms of how this was handled I could understand if the property didn’t rent for the dates we booked, but it did, and they were paid for a successful reservation. In this case, there was a lost opportunity to do the right thing and keep a customer. Future potential customers. Be careful, be cautious, please pick a different travel company other than Nomadness, and enjoy your future trip. I know we will.