I have been using airbnb for 5 years now and this was the worst experience with a host to date. If you look through the reviews left for Matthew you will notice that his response to any critical review is insulting, demeaning or both. Let’s see what kind of response this review gets. (We did notice his insulting responses before we booked but on short notice this place allegedly had what we needed so we booked it anyway. Big mistake.)
This was by far the most unsatisfactory airbnb stay to date for us. The reason is the behaviour of the host (Matthew).
When we first came to the airbnb we could not connect to the wifi. Wifi is very important to me as I work remotely. This listing advertised having good wifi, which was one of the main reasons I booked it. I contacted Matthew to let him know of the issue. First he told us to switch on and off the router. So we restarted the router and all our devices and still nothing. Then I contacted Matthew again via airbnb and when I didn’t hear from him for a few hours I also contacted him via WhatsApp. I didn’t hear back from him until the next day. First he told me he only prefers to be contacted via airbnb since he gets about 100 messages each day and then he told us the internet was working fine for the guests before us. He offered no assistance to fix the issue for us. My boyfriend and I performed our own troubleshooting and got the connection working briefly but it continued to have many drop-offs. We kept telling Matthew about the internet and he provided us with no assistance. Rather he told us Dodo (the internet provider) said there were no known outages and went on to tell us incidents of how his friend also doesn't have good internet at his place which is neither relevant to us nor helped us. Then he went on to say that wifi not working is not his fault and we should just hotspot. That was ludicrous. Airbnb should suspend his account for not providing the services that he claims are available. Additionally, he would respond to our messages nearly a day later which was very frustrating. I was having to leave the house to go elsewhere to do my remote work because of the unstable internet. Three days into our stay the internet stopped working all together. Again our efforts to get assistance from Matthew resulted in no action. So we called Dodo ourselves. Luckily Dodo was willing to troubleshoot the connection even if we were not the owners of the account. At first we tried to get Matthew to add our phone number to the account so Dodo would work with us directly but he refused. When we explained this to Dodo they agreed to work directly with us anyway. Dodo then arranged for a person from nbn to come and fix the connection the next day. They couldn’t give us an exact time the repair person would be there. So we stayed home the whole next day for the nbn person to come and fix the connection which he managed to do after 2 hours. The repair person told us there were 2 separate wiring problems in the chain leading up to the house and the only way that this would have been fixed was to get someone from repair out there, not simply restarting the modem as was the only assistance Matthew was willing to give. During this whole time Matthew was useless. He didn’t do anything to help resolve the issue, he wasn’t even willing to come to the airbnb when we told him the nbn person is coming over to try to fix the connection. The entire time spent fixing the broken internet connection was left to us, the customer. We wasted an entire day of our vacation doing Matthew’s job for him. We should not be paying $150/night for this, Matthew should be paying us. I have never stayed in an airbnb where the host doesn’t take any action to help the guests especially when it's a service in the property listing that is not working. Also he was a host that was very difficult to communicate with, often not responding for an entire day. I would definitely NOT recommend this property to anyone. Stay away!!!!! We have also filed a complaint with airbnb about Matthew, my first complaint with airbnb after 5 years.