This review is not based on the residence itself, or cleanliness, as we were unable to get into our accommodation. The review is, unfortunately, purely regards to this unfortunate circumstance that left us stranded on Christmas Eve, when the entire town was closing up shop.
Up until this point, Irene had been incredibly communicative, however, the day after booking she had promised to send the codes to the lock box, and they never arrived. We were running around managing other last minute plans before our trip and so it wasn't until we landed in Hobart that we realised we hadn't been sent the codes. We had mentioned that we would be arriving quite late in the afternoon since we were arriving from Hobart, and so at 3:30pm when we were about 3hrs out, we messaged to remind Irene to send the codes. We heard nothing back, and after we tried many times to call, we arrived at the accommodation still without a lock key code. An hour of calling, texting, messaging on the platform and even talking to neighbours, we were unable to get a hold of Irene. We even scoured through every single message and email in case we had simply missed this detail. Unfortunately, we hadn't. We also had to contact Airbnb who attempted to contact Irene themselves, but to no avail. At this stage, I was genuinely worried something had happened.
It was getting closer to 8pm, and we had no idea where we could sleep, given that it was Christmas Eve in Queenstown and not much else was open. Luckily we called a motel manager down the road and he drove down to let us in, otherwise we would have had to drive to Strahan or sleep in the car (as everything else was booked out or closed).
At 11pm, we got a phone call - from Irene asking what had happened. She mentioned that her phone had stopped working unexpectedly, which was why she was unable to contact us.
I understand that life happens, and this situation was very unfortunate, but I asked her why she couldn't have used a computer, or a friends phone or internet, to check the messages to make sure we had checked in, since she would have known that check in was going to happen after 2pm and we had mentioned we would be in later. Instead we were told that she did everything for the business through her phone, which is why she couldn't reply to us. As someone running a business, we were disappointed that she would use this as an excuse, especially given that she had mentioned earlier that she would message us the lock code a few days before we arrived (and didn't).
This unfortunately led to this first night of the trip being ruined, as we had spent over an hour racing trying to find a solution instead of settling in to relax after a very long day. It also meant that a heap of groceries we had purchased earlier (since the local IGA was going to be closed when we arrived) to make dinner had to go to waste as the motel we had to stay in did not have cooking facilities and fridge space to store it all.