Nice place, nice location…and a THREE-HOUR WAIT to get in.

I really liked this studio apartment in Palermo. It was clean, quiet, had air conditioning, and was in a great location. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend it, because of the experience we had with the owner. In the beginning, Emiliano was very helpful, and sent us the address, as well as directions from the airport. But that’s where the communication ended.

My boyfriend sent him an email a week before we left, to confirm our stay and other trip details. Since we were arriving on a Saturday at 8pm, we wanted to make sure someone would be there to let us in. We continued to try and contact him multiple times before our stay (three separate times). We never received a response so we decided to just show up at the address and see if someone would be there. When the cab dropped us off that day, no one was there to let us in the building. We followed another resident inside and waited. AND WAITED. Luckily, another man who lived in the building, (and spoke English, since our Spanish isn’t great) saw us sitting in the lobby and took my boyfriend up to his apartment to use his Wifi, so we could send another message to Emiliano. Again, he did not respond.

We ended up going to a café down the street, called Chungo, where we searched for another place to stay, and my boyfriend contacted a friend of his who lives in Buenos Aires. I’ll call him John. Oddly, JOHN was the one who finally got in contact with Emiliano, through an app called “Whats App.” It was now 10pm. Emiliano told John a man named Diego would meet us in the lobby at 11.

An hour later, we went back to the building, and met up with Diego. He took us upstairs, gave us the keys, said something about the Wifi password and quickly left. We found several pieces of paper with logins and passcodes, but none of them worked for the Wifi. We contacted both Diego and Emiliano with no help or answers regarding the WiFi issues. This was quite frustrating, as my boyfriend is a web designer and was hoping to do some work during our trip.

We stayed there for two days, and didn’t hear from Emiliano again until my boyfriend (working from the coffee shop) emailed AirBnB and copied Emiliano, to express his disappointment and ask about checkout. Emiliano finally responded immediately, (quite ironic considering it was the ONLY contact we had and it was when we were apparently suppose to checkout) and said there wasn’t any problem with the Wifi, apparently waited all day for us to arrive and was surprised to find out we were still in the apartment. Emiliano did give us an additional two hours to pack up and leave, but the check-in/check-out was really stressful, and I feel I should warn people about our experience.