Claxton holiday cottage rental with internet access, walking, fireplace and TV

Dear Guest Thank you for the lovely review. We are very glad you enjoyed your stay and felt relaxed in our cottage. We hope to welcome you again to stay at The Old Granary.

OK firstly this review is full of absolute un-truths and lies. Sadly it is even slanderous!! I will answer everything you have commented on with the absolute truth in the following statements: I will start with stating we are extremely proud of this property having spent tens of thousands of pounds this year renovating and fitting out the cottage with lovely and expensive fixtures and fittings. The property was designed this way to give our guests a really good quality feel and to ensure they really relax into the property and enjoy their holiday. No expense has been spared and we have set our standards to be at the highest levels for holiday lets accommodation within the UK and to ensure that we are great value for money. With that focus in mind the carpets installed in the house where obviously brand new six months ago and are of luxurious quality. Upon you booking with us several months ago we went out of our way to accommodate you, even allowing an early check in, despite the fact our housekeeping team where still working on cleaning the cottage from the previous guests, who incidentally only checked out one hour before you arrived. When a guest checks out we have a thorough check list to ensure the cottage is absolutely perfect for the next Guests. Included in the checks is inspecting for damages etc! Sometimes we find minor damages but they have always been due to a genuine accident and have not warranted any action, furthermore the guests have always let us know about the damage in advance, which is always greatly appreciated. Upon inspection of the property after you left, there was a major stain on the ground floor bedroom carpet. We know that this stain only occurred during your stay as we know 100% it was absolutely not there prior to your arrival. The next stage of the process to resolve this involved our housekeeping team using various carpet cleaning products to try to remove the stain. They have used the same products many times to remove minor damage that has been caused naturally and no other action has ever been warranted. In fact in over 6 months of the property being open as a holiday cottage, we have NEVER made any form of claim against previous guests for any damages caused at all!! Therefore we are sorry to say you are the first. Unfortunately the carpet cleaning products failed to remove this large stain and therefore we had to ensure the correct procedure was followed to the letter with the booking agency that you used. In this case it was Booking.com. We contacted them straight away to let them know about the damages and their normal procedure is to contact you the same day themselves, so they asked you to contact us and discuss this with us. They did this as they gave us copies of all correspondence, however you did not return our initial attempts for contact. The booking agents asked you for £200 for the cleaning of the carpet as it is their standard cost for this kind of damage. To be fair we thought it was to high the amount and that £150 would cover the costs for the carpet to be professional cleaned. That is why you where first asked for £200 and then we asked them to reduce it to £150 to be fairer to you!! Eventually after the booking agents continued to contact you, you responded to contact us 5 days later and you spoke with a lady called Maria at The Old Granary. During this phone call you where agitated, very arrogant and quite simply rude with her. You refused to accept you had caused this damage even though we had explained it was definitely not there before you arrived and we had the evidence to support this. It is an absolute lie and slanderous to state Maria said you where "Common" and that we had "Seen your type before" The fact you have used these terms in your review is disgusting and we absolutely 100% DENY that these terms of speech where used towards you!! We gave the booking agents all the evidence that they asked from us, which was more than enough proof for them to support our claim. Again it`s simply another lie to state that they said we had insufficient evidence. However it was you who self stated it was not enough proof. To say the booking agents asked for more evidence from us is just completely untrue!! Unfortunately for us the booking agents did not take a security deposit from you when you booked as we used to have quite a relaxed booking system for our guests convenience, as we never thought that someone would try to exploit this. Maybe we where naive for this but unfortunately we have certainly learnt our lesson from this. Therefore due to this issue we have had to change our entire booking system so that we now take a security deposit directly upon the guests arrival via a debit or credit card. This is to ensure that we avoid another potential situation like this. As we said to you over the phone very politely, we accept that we cannot insist or enforce you to make the payment for the carpet cleaning, due to not having a security deposit in place. We have accepted this and we had moved on from it! However we will not accept a direct abuse of this review system and a direct use of slander against us!! Therefore unfortunately despite being happy to put it down to experience, you have now left us with no other option but to follow this up with Trip Adviser and the booking agents!! Finally from us I would just like to state we operate with all the main online booking agents and we have never once had any negative or even an average review against us. Every single review excluding yours has been excellent and the evidence of that is for all to see on the relevant booking sites. Simply put our total amount of "excellent" reviews is over 75 different reviews in total. The total amount of any other review that is not deemed "excellent" is only 1 which is obviously yours! These overall figures and reviews speak volumes about the type of people we are and the unrivalled care and attention we put into our guests stay at The Old Granary. Hopefully most people will see through your spiteful review for exactly what it is!! It is extremely sad you felt justified to leave a terrible and untrue review, instead of just accepting the damage you had caused!! However this just shows a lot about your character, rather than actually damaging the reputation of us.