This house looks beautiful and clean online. The reviews are mostly glowing. That is why our family group of nine adults was excited to rent it for our stay on the Big Island. Once we began to look through the rooms, what we found shocked and dismayed us.

The countertops in the kitchen were sticky, the floors dirty, and windowsills full of dead bugs. There were even dead bugs on the countertops. My daughter opened the dishwasher and a cockroach ran out! Ants were inside the crock pot.

In the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms we found stained bedding, yellow stains around the base of toilets and also spattered on the walls, dirty toilet seats, and toothpaste smeared on a bath cabinet shelf. On the floor behind the toilet in one of the bathrooms was an empty plastic vial and used cotton ball from previous guests.

The basement (where two of the bedrooms are located) was truly frightening with spider webs still inhabited by the spiders. We found dead and living cockroaches on every floor of the house.

I called the housekeeper (the only phone number I had) and told her of our concerns. She laughed at me and then became defensive and informed me that she and her daughter had spent the entire day cleaning the house for us. I told her I needed to talk with the owner, Charlotte Dewar. Charlotte lives in California and called within just a few minutes. As I explained the condition of the house and that we did not want to stay there, she was very apologetic and immediately said she would refund our money and that if we couldn't find another place to stay that night (by then it was about 8 p.m.) we could stay there that night for free. We unfortunately had to stay, but first thing in the morning moved to another Home Away property we had found that was about 20 minutes away.

This entire incident was upsetting and took time away from our vacation. I want to be clear that Charlotte Dewar was very kind and understanding and did all she could to make things right, refunding all the money she had received. However, we lost the $162 fee that Home Away charges. We took several photos of the things I have described here and emailed them to Charlotte. She said was dismayed.

We were willing to overlook minor problems in homes we rented on Oahu and Kauai. This is a beautiful home, but it needs to be treated by an exterminator and then have a thorough, deep cleaning by professionals who know how to clean and maintain a property and care enough to do it right.