Here was my experience, I had intended on leaving no review at all but the owner leaves me no choice. You’ll see why.
We rented this property for two nights (the required minimum stay) to do some snowmobiling in the area. Due to a warm up the day before arrival a lot of the snow here melted, but that’s no big deal, we can just trailer up north for the day and come back to the farmhouse. However, within 5 minutes of our arrival at 1pm, the electricity went out (and most importantly the HEAT, it was 15 degrees and dropping into the negatives). The owners called the power company who gave a repair time of 3:15pm. The outage was widespread throughout the area. So we waited over 2 hours, and then by 4pm had to make a decision: If you were in a farmhouse in rural Maine, with no electricity/heat/light, and there was no certain time this would change, what would you do? We did what any halfway reasonable person would do-we left. I called the owner and advised that given the situation we would need to find other accommodations as this one was not legally inhabitable under Maine state law.
As it turned out we could not find any nearby accommodations due to the power outage so we made the 3 hour drive home. The next day, I contacted the owner and requested a refund for the booking as the home was uninhabitable on arrival. The homeowner would only credit one third of the total, forcing me to pay (a censored amount of money because Home Away won't let me tell you) for a house that I couldn’t stay in (including a cleaning fee!!) The owner stated that it was because we “chose” to leave, and the power came back on later “that evening”
Here’s the bottom line, most reasonable adults would shake hands and agree it’s too bad an unforeseeable circumstance like a power outage happened, here’s your money back, we’ll try again next time. But these greedy people are not reasonable. So if you choose to get involved with them, good luck, you’re on your own. You’ve been warned.