Island vacation 2015 -Day 3 Why rent a home or “villa” for an island vacation?

Day 3 was dedicated to decompressing from travel, sunning on the deck, taking in the gorgeous views, using the grill to make burgers, and enjoying island cocktails with abandon.
We have rented homes for 9 vacations. We love the convenience of more space than a hotel room, a kitchen where we can make breakfast or a snack, and the feeling of living in the places we visit versus just being tourists. There are many websites advertising and offering homes for rent for vacationers. It is a must to do your homework and follow some simple guidelines when renting on sites such as Vacation rental by owner (VRBO or Home away) or local real estate or property rental companies. First rule to follow is to have a list of questions and ask those to a person, avoid emailing or voicemail tag. You want to make sure that the rental is a legitimate rental, we did have one “owner” respond via email, with no phone number, just email. The price was extremely low and that is usually the first clue that something is fishy. Most owners will work with you if you have a budget, but if you get an offer that is much lower than the asking rate you should not get a “I won the lottery” reaction- you need to be wary and extra careful as there are scammers who will ask you to wire money as a deposit. Ours asked us to send it to England, which we did not do.
As we were looked for this house on St John we scouted several sites and looked up forum posts on TripAdvisor to get insights and info from other travelers who had experience with the island. We saw several discussions on the forum boards with this same type of experience. So as the saying goes- “buyer beware”. In the end! those insights and on line discussions provided a fairly easy path to figure out where we wanted to stay.
For this trip our choice was a house up on Bordeaux Mountain because it was remote, quiet and on past visits we have stayed closer to the water and wanted the experience of being up high, but still close to some restaurants, trails and beaches. We had rented from this owner for one of our trips to St Thomas and found them to be responsive, helpful and priced within our budget. www.seatopeakvillas.com. The houses have both been clean, well stocked and the villa on St John exceeded our expectations.
Day 3 was a relaxing and fun day and as we hit the pillow that night we had a beautiful steady rain shower to lull us to sleep.