Manager Response to Gabriel

Dear Mrs Geuder,

Thank you for your feedback about Ithemba and I am terribly sorry that it didn't meet your expectations.

I will respond to your comments one at a time below. My primary response is that you did not give us any opportunity to attend to any of your grievances. You were given the 24 hour contact number on arrival, as well as your consultants personal telephone number, and if you had contacted either of these numbers we would have been able to attend to all of your complaints.

1. The Heat
Being our summer season the weather does occasionally get very warm and unfortunately the apartment does not have air-conditioning. Generally speaking this property does not need it, as it is right on the bay, and it is very rare for the weather to be hot and still. 99% of the time there is a sea breeze that keeps the property very comfortable. If you had notified us we would have been able to arrange portable air-conditioning units on a temporary basis.

2. The pool pump
The pool pumps all run on timers. They are generally set to run during the day (from approximately 10am until 6pm). If there is any power interruption this affects the pool timers, and they will go out of sync (and can potentially run overnight, instead of during the day). If you had contacted us we would very happily have come to the property to reset the timer.

3. The safe.
Ashley (your check-in consultant) explained the safe to you on arrival, demonstrating it to you and allowing you to use it while she was there to ensure that you understood how it worked. You mistakenly locked the safe without resetting the code to your own personal code. When you contacted Ashley she had planned to come out at 09:30 the next day to open it up using the master key. To say that the safe was broken is completely incorrect.

4. The alarm
The alarm was then reported to Ashley as being a problem so she had arranged for a technician to come and see to it the following day.

5. The coffee machine
The coffee machine was working.

6. The pool
Ashley checked to pool on arrival and it was perfectly clean. The pool is serviced on a weekly basis by a professional pool company.

7. The towels
Servicing brought the laundered towels into the property at 15h30, which was 1h30 after the check in time. I am sorry for the inconvenience. There were also spare towels in the main bedroom cupboard which we could have offered you had you contacted us.

8. The refund
I assume that you contacted the agent that you booked through when you say "he made it clear that this was our problem". Unfortunately none of the issues listed above warranted a full refund. Had you given us the opportunity to attend to any of them we would have done so happily and quickly. Unfortunately you made a unilateral decision to move out without giving us any opportunity to help you. In that situation it is completely unfair for us to sacrifice the owner of the property's income.

I am very sorry that the experience did not live up to your expectations. We pride ourselves on our service, and generally our customers are very satisfied. I do not believe that your rating is an accurate reflection of the property at all, and I firmly believe that you would have had a fantastic time at iThemba had you given us any opportunity to rectify the small issues that you were having.

If you are ever returning to Cape Town I will happily offer you a discounted stay. Please do not hesitate to take us up on this offer by contacting the office and referring to this post.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Marshall
Nox Rentals