As an elderly couple—with outstanding reviews from Airbnb hosts from all over the world—we are sorry to report that our experience at Lucila’s apartment in Buenos Aires (our own hometown) was an unmitigated disaster.
The building, located in a busy part of Palermo, was about 60 years old. It had a rundown lobby with peeling paint and iffy elevators. The apartment itself was smaller than what it appeared in the pictures (50 m2 minus a 10m2 locked up bedroom, leaving about 450 sqf of usable space). The only sofa in the living room was very small and uncomfortable with worn, flat cushion seats. The coffee table shown in the pictures was missing. Among several other problems, there were large patches of dirt on the bedroom floor, a dirty oven, with dirty oven trays and signs of longstanding water damage on one of the kitchen walls.
In brief, we found an old apartment which may have seen better days (and gotten better reviews then) but is now in need of serious cleaning, painting and repairs before being offered at Airbnb again. We reported the problems found, both to the host and to Airbnb within the first 72 hours. The host immediately accused us of “not liking the apartment.” Of course, we would have liked it much better had it been clean and in good repair.
Regrettably the host, who lives abroad, did not send anyone to check those issues until day 6 after our arrival. In the interim, she sent us several very rude, threatening messages accusing us of having caused each of the problems we reported (i.e. We reported large patches of dirt on the bedroom floor, covered with months-worth of lint, dust and hair; she accused us of having caused those patches by burning the bedroom floor with mosquito coils. (There are no mosquitoes in Buenos Aires at this time, and we have not seen mosquito coils since childhood! Moreover, the dirt patches she characterized as burns disappeared with water and soap once the person in charge of cleaning came to check them out.)
Undeterred by the facts, the host held onto her odd beliefs and continued to threaten us with claims for damages, forcing us to spend valuable vacation time documenting the apartment deficiencies and communicating back and forth with her and with Airbnb about the sorry status of her place while at the same time trying to find suitable accommodations for the rest of our stay.
On the morning of day 8, we found that the pipe under the bathroom sink had become detached. True to her modus operandi, as soon as she heard about it, the host blamed us for having pulled the pipes apart ourselves. This time around, she sent a plumber who found a rotten, rusted base ring at the bottom of the sink and changed the piece, solving the problem in 10 minutes.
That same day, after reviewing the evidence (pictures of walls, sink ring, dirt patches, etc. as well as the barrage of threats and insults from the host we had been forwarding) Airbnb allowed us to terminate the reservation immediately, 31 days earlier than anticipated. The threats and fabrications continued to the very last minute, when the host accused us of being “racist” and “mistreating the apartment cleaner,” a helpful, hardworking fellow Argentinian with whom we had established a brief, but very cordial relationship.
In summary, Lucila not only failed to fulfill her responsibilities as a host, but, even worse, became threatening and abusive whenever we pointed out the deficiencies we found in her apartment. A nightmare from beginning to end and, by far, our worst Airbnb experience ever.