Clifton YOLO Spaces – Clifton Mansion Villa

A word of warning to anyone considering booking holiday accommodation through this company. YOLO Living Spaces holds itself out as an offering luxury accommodation to discerning travellers. In June last year, after viewing several apartments in the Clifton area for our friends, who were due to visit for 3 weeks in January 2023, we selected one hosted by YOLO based upon its quiet location, quality furnishings and amenities including an on-site communal pool. Our friends duly received a confirmed booking for that property; indeed they booked it from the day before their arrival, to ensure that they could check in straightaway. They arrived at the appointed address on the early morning of 16 January, after a 12 hour flight, to find no-one to greet them. Upon texting the company owner, a Yolinda Liversage, she advised them to go to a completely different address. At that other location, a YOLO representative appeared and gave them access to a dingy, unappealing apartment on the third floor of a building directly overlooking the very noisy Victoria Road. This apartment bore no resemblance to the property they had booked. Bizarrely, the YOLO representative made no mention of the fact that this was not, in fact, the correct property. It was only when our friends raised the issue that he admitted that yes, indeed, they had been “moved” from the originally booked property. When our friends objected, YOLO claimed that the guests occupying the original property were an elderly couple, one of whom was unwell and - so the story went - they had asked to stay on. YOLO (through its “reservations manager”, a Mr Viljoen) went so far as to suggest that the company had taken a “humanitarian decision” to allow them to stay on and had “upgraded” our friends to a better property. When asked in what sense the second property was an upgrade, Mr Viljoen said that it benefited from a lift! We subsequently visited the original property, to find a middle-aged couple in perfect health in residence. The truth, it would appear, was that YOLO and Ms Liversage had simply decided that they could make more money by reletting the original property to someone else, and shunting our friends to a different one. It bears emphasising that YOLO made no attempt to communicate this unilateral decision to our friends before they left the UK, nor to consult with them in any way. No offer of compensation, nor even an apology (or truthful explanation), was put forward. The only alternative option suggested was to refund our friends - plainly not a viable option for people who had travelled 10,000 miles expecting the holiday of a lifetime. When, as local residents, we tried to speak with Ms Liversage directly ourselves, she dodged our calls and declined to make any meaningful comment. In short, in our experience, YOLO Living Spaces is an unscrupulous and unprofessional organisation, which cares nothing for the quality of its guests’ holiday experience. As local residents, we found their conduct an embarrassment to Cape Town, and to the usually first-class hospitality culture of South Africa.