Essays and Editorials

THE TELEPHONE AND YOUR SECURITY DEPOSIT - AN UNRESOLVED ISSUE

Most of you will want a telephone in your Italian vacation rental, both for making and for receiving calls. Many of you will want to bring your laptop and sit on-line to check email or otherwise connect yourselves to the internet. Fine. (Some properties have no phones at all, especially in the lake area and in the Cinque Terre area. See individual property descriptions.)

But imagine this: Let’s say you rented your own home on a short-term basis with a phone line in it. How would you track the usage? We at Vacanza Bella don’t know of any easy way to do so, and the situation becomes even more complicated with calls made via the operator, or if the long-distance provider is different from the local provider, etc., etc.

The Italian owner finds himself in exactly the same position, but he is even more vulnerable, because Italy is a country in which phone calls can cost many times more than similar calls in the US.

Until just recently, you could actually track usage very conveniently on an Italian phone by calling a special number. That number was answered by a computer voice which read out the number of message units currently on the phone. If you called this number at the beginning and end of your stay, you calculated the message units and paid for them. Beautiful.

Like all good things, this one has apparently come to an end, and the computer-voice system no longer works and/or is no longer reliable, plus the situation has become complicated by the proliferation of long-distance providers.

There are only two solutions:

(a) You decide you can live without a phone, and we ask the owner to remove the instrument; under this scenario, you may want to bring your own cell phone, being sure it’s usable overseas (as relatively few are) and use Italy’s ubiquitous public internet points for checking email.

Or

(b) You wait for the phone bill to come in before we return your security deposit to you. When we ourselves rent a place in England, this is precisely what happens. And in Italy, as in England, the phone bill comes every two months. Thus, if your stay happens to coincide with the beginning of the billing cycle, it may be 90 days before the bill comes in and gets checked.

It’s up to you.

Contrary to our counsel, many owners are removing fixed telephone lines and insisting that guests use their own cellular phones, or the owners themselves will furnish a cellular phone in the villa. This latter solution is not the greatest, as far as we’re concerned, because it could happen that you inadvertently walk away with the phone; or you need elaborate instructions on, say, how to retrieve messages on the phone, and so on.

The situation is in flux as we write these words (February 2004), and we will update this site as things develop.