Renting a flat or a house during the holiday can be a better deal than the hotel, especially if you are in family, in Alicante you can rent a 3 bedrooms townhouse for £350 €530 (at today change rate), 2 weeks during the summer at any hotels in Alicante will cost you much more than that.
The holiday renting market is regulated, if you follow some recommendations you can avoid bad surprises, consumer organizations are getting thousand of complaints each year, because people don’t know their rights and obligations.
The most common complaints are:

  • The house is of a lower standard than advertised
  • Blatant hygiene fault
  • Lesser lodging capacity
  • Electricity malfunctioning
  • Distance from the beach not respected

The very first thing to do is to ask for a written description of the property you are interested to rent. This document must contains the description of the property, the exact location, renting period, description of installations and services included, price and taxes (VAT).

Verify the property before you sign the contract, because, the contract in most of the time claims that you get the property in perfect state which is not always true and if you signed something the landlord may make you pay for the defect in the house, since you signed for a perfect house. Normally, you are excepted to pay a guarantee, this guarantee should never exceed 25 % of the total price of the rent. You should pay at the time you enter the house not before.

Once, the contract is over you should get the guarantee back to you, providing no damages has been inflicted to the property.

There are additional things that you can do:

If you have the exact address of the property, you can call the nearest tourist office, to check the real distance from the beach.

It’s best to keep, the contract, the ads for the property, bills and other documents concerning the property in case you are in situation where to have to do a complaint.