Woman discovers her in-laws charge her near market rate to stay at their paid-off vacation home, while her sister-in-law stays there for free whenever she vacations with them

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  via Allyssa Sayers

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• A thousand euros plus utilities plus a cleaning fee lands about a hundred to two hundred short of just booking a comparable place nearby. That gap is being presented as a family discount, which raises the obvious question of what exactly the discount is for. Normally the answer to that question is love, but love usually does not come with a rental management company and an invoice.

• AITAH for being salty that my in-laws charge us a lot of money to stay in their vacation home?

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• My in-laws bought a vacation house a few years ago. It’s fully paid off, and they have a rental company managing it when they’re not using it. They offer us the chance to stay there for almost two weeks every year — but they expect us to pay around €1000, plus utilities and the final cleaning fee.

• To be clear: I completely understand paying utilities and cleaning so they don’t lose money on our stay. That seems fair to me. What bothers me is the €1000 rent on top of that. The price they’re asking is similar (maybe 100-200€ less in total) as what we’d pay for any comparable vacation house in that area. So from my perspective, why would I spend our family vacation every year in my in-laws’ house if there’s no financial benefit and I could just book somewhere else?

• 
  via Allyssa Sayers

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• What makes it sting even more is that when my sister-in-law goes there with my in-laws, they pay for everything. So it feels like there’s this unspoken pressure: if you vacation with them, it’s free — if you want your own family vacation there, you almost pay market rate. It feels like a way to pressure us into vacationing together.

• My husband thinks I’m overreacting and says his parents are being generous because “€1000 for almost two weeks is cheap.” He sees nothing wrong with it. My parents were shocked about it too. My husband says I’m just spoiled because I’m an only child. As a parent myself, I can’t imagine charging my own children that much money to stay in a property I own outright. Covering costs? Absolutely. Charging a slightly reduced rental price? That feels weird and transactional to me.

• AITA for feeling salty about this and not wanting to go there every year?

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• 
  via Apostolos Vamvouras

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• The sister-in-law’s part is where the arrangement stops being about covering costs and starts being about something else entirely. Vacationing with the in-laws costs nothing. Vacationing independently at their property costs almost market rate. That is not a pricing structure. That is a preference being expressed through a spreadsheet.

• Her husband's response that she is spoiled for being an only child is a fascinating pivot because it reframes a financial observation as a character flaw. She is not asking for a free vacation. She is asking why the family discount exists only when the whole family goes together, and why the alternative is paying rates that make the whole arrangement basically pointless. These are reasonable things to notice.

• The fully paid-off part matters more than it might seem. A mortgage changes the calculus because the owners genuinely need income to cover the property. No mortgage means the thousand euros is pure profit on a stay by immediate family, which is a completely legal and valid choice but also one that reasonable people are allowed to have feelings about

• As a pressure mechanism it’s actually pretty elegant. Make the independent vacation almost as expensive as a regular booking, make the group vacation free, and then act puzzled when people feel nudged toward a particular outcome. Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. Nobody has to. The pricing already handled it.

• Feeling salty about paying near market rate to vacation at your in-laws' mortgage-free property while your sister-in-law goes for free is not spoiled. It is just arithmetic.

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