Albany, 71 Fore Street, Port Isaac, Cornwall Inc Scilly, PL29 3RF

We Paid over £2000 to stay in "Albany House" in Cornwall. The property was well appointed, comfortable and well preseneted. We were travelling with our two children (1yo and 3yo).

On our arrival on the Friday afternoon we noticed a few things that suggested that the place hadn't been cleaned thoroughly; there was a dirty (used) glass on the shelf in the living area, a broken bowl on the shelf in the kitchen and the worktops in the kitchen were sticky. After we had unpacked, we noticed that our 1yo's hands and knees were black from where he had been crawling on the floor in the kitchen / living area. I attempted to contact Sykes / John Bray to raise the issue as we just presumed that it had been missed, however by this time the office was closed.

We contacted them again the next morning and the "property inspector" very quickly arrived to inspect and see what could be done. The "property inspector" was very dismissive of the issues and implied that we were making a fuss out of nothing, blamed the sticky tops on the cleaning product used and the dirty floors on the fact that they were slate / wood and thats just how they are. The "property inspector" begrudgingly agreed to get the property re-cleaned and that this would happen towards the end of the day, which we were happy with.

The "cleaner's" turned up at approximately 3pm and asked "we just need to hoover yes", we explained that no, we would like the floors cleaned and filthy rug removed. By this time we'd cleaned the kitchen ourselves with some "Mr Muscle" we had brought with us. The "cleaners" then proceeded to vaccume the floors and then wipe them over with a "Refillable Flash Speed Mop" (the kind of thing that you would use every day in between cleans) and promptly left.

We attempted to contact Sykes / John Bray again to explain that this wasn't satisfactory but by this time it went to an out of hours service. I explained the situation and that we wouldn't feel comfortable letting our 1yo crawl around on floors in this state. The operator said that there was nothing more that they could do until Monday (half way through our holiday). I contested that I wasn't happy with this and asked if I were to get the floors cleaned myself, if I could be reimbursed for this. I was told that I would be if I kept receipts for the products used and took photo's to evidence this.

I went out and bought cleaning products, spent over an hour thoroughly vaccuming and cleaning the floors, got through five mop buckets of water/flash floor cleaner solution, the floors were clean and we were happy that we could walk about without getting dirty.

From then on we continued to have a great time enjoying the fantastic Cornwall coast.

On the Thursday evening we received an email from Sykes saying that the property had already been cleaned twice and that there would be no reimbursment. I went into the local Sykes / John Bray office to mention this, I explained that I had photo's etc clearly showing the state that it was in, however there seemed to be no way of getting these to the office staff. Although they had email addresses these all go through the Sykes systems first and get filtered / processed depending on the nature of them. The "property inspector" turned up at the end and rolling their eyes said "what's wrong now".

In the end I gave up, I'm not out to try to get money off, I just wanted my family to be able to enjoy our holiday.

I won't be using John Bray / Sykes again as this is the third place that we have stayed with sub-standard cleaning and it just lets the places down.

Hopefully more owners will take heed of this and either manage them selves through Air B&B or go to Port Isaac Bay Holidays, who actually seem to care.