ELP Luxury Vacations

As we approach the annual Vacation Rental Management Association (VRMA) conference, I was thinking what were the main things I'd like to give and takeaway from it. It dawned on me that the below email we received from a partner earlier this summer summed it up perfectly - The 100 Collection? was born out of attending this and similar conferences, always in an effort to find a better way. There is not just 1 way, there are multiple ways, and next week is an amazing opportunity to be inspired to find what is your next way. Look forward to seeing you there! Unedited - "Good morning! Here's the story of what happened to us in May of this year: In November 2023, we booked a condo at Rosemary Beach through VRBO. We had stayed in the development before and looked forward to going back. We had paid the entire amount of the rental by early 2024. Just 12 days before our check-in date in late May 2024, we received a message from VRBO, telling us that our booking had been cancelled. The owner also offered us an "equivalent property," which turned out to be the exact same condo we booked in November but for 20% more than we had already paid. The only follow-up information we received was that the condo had been sold and the new owner was not honoring past bookings. My wife and I faced a difficult choice—should we just bite the bullet and pay the additional amount to ensure we still had a place to take our four kids? I called the VRBO support line and was told our issue was being escalated to a team that would contact us back within 24 hours with options. We decided to wait on that update, but it never came. We never heard anything further from VRBO or the owner, but they at least fully refunded our payments. While we were trying to figure out what to do, convinced that there was no way to book something on such short notice, we remembered that our friend, Tom Goodwin, runs Mountain Laurel Chalets. And we remembered him telling us that they had recently been inducted into a group of property managers. We went to their website and found the link to The 100 Collection?. Within a few minutes, we found vacation rentals on 30A that were available during the week we were planning to go to the beach. Not long after, we had booked a house with ELP Luxury Vacations for the same week at almost the same price we had paid for the condo at Rosemary. Unlike the condo, where our kids had to share bedrooms, in the ELP property, each child had their own room. And even more unlike being part of a big condo development, you could walk out of the house onto a private beach. That week was absolutely fantastic and memorable for our family. The house was perfect, the private beach was amazing, and the six-seater golf cart to drive around was a highlight for our kids as well."