We booked this house for Christmas week. When we arrived to start our rental, the house smelled like sewage and dead mice. In the kitchen, there were dead flies all over the floor, table, and countertops. Upstairs, there was an unflushed poop in the toilet. The smell was the deal breaker for us, so we turned around and drove home. We were in touch with the owner, who told us we should have called the maintenance person to fix the situation. We didn't think it was our responsibility to make sure the place was clean and livable. The owner insisted that the cleaning crew had been there a few hours before we got there, and in his communications with us he said we were being inauthentic and essentially accused of lying. It was clear to us that the cleaning crew had not been there that day, or even recently. If it were my house, I would want to know that the cleaning crew wasn't doing its job and that there was something wrong with the septic, but the owner was combative and thought we were the problem. This whole thing was a bummer because we spent a lot of money on the house rental and ski passes, only to use neither of them. We tried to get our money back through VRBO, but all we got were people in call centers overseas who were reading from scripts and had no interest in helping resolve the situation. We otherwise have had great VRBO experiences.