This is an absolutely beautiful apartment, a few minutes from downtown via the metro that is literally just around the block. Great cafes and bars in the neighbourhood and a short walk to the canal if you don’t want to take the metro.
The downside however was that it seemed like our host did not want to be renting her house. After I booked she asked specific questions about the genders of the guests, which seemed irrelevant to me. A few days after she arrived she called us at 7:59 am to let us know that she forgot she had booked a tiler to fix the bathroom and that he was coming at 8 am (in one minute). We were very accommodating and one of our guests spoke German so she was able to communicate with the worker and basically set him up. However, we needed to leave for our school lectures and we all felt insecure leaving our belongings, money, passports, laptops and other valuables with the worker who was going to spend the day there. While we were gone, the host decided she needed to “dust the apartment”, so she went ahead and went through the space in order to dust. She let us know this afterwards, which felt like a breach of our privacy and the security of our belongings.
A few days later she again texted to let us know she was going into the apartment to get her bicycle. She then accused us of having more guests than we booked for because she was counting our luggage.
We decided to let it go and remain positive, but one of her neighbours apparently complained about us making excessive noise on the terraces, which we hadn’t even spent time on because we were busy with our course from 8 in the morning until late at night, and it had been raining terribly! When the weather did become nice, we all spent the day in town exploring and hadn’t been on the terrace at all. We then received angry, scolding messages from the host saying that because of our behaviour we were now “forbidden from going out on the terrace”. She phoned our one German speaking guest continuously and texted repeatedly in order to share her angry messages. This created a lot of anxiety and stress on our part, especially since we hadn’t even spent time on the terraces and we had been so tolerant of her 8 am worker scheduling error.
When we were checking out, she again phoned and texted our German speaking guest repeatedly to ask when we were leaving, even though she had let Elxe know had to leave early and was longer in Vienna. I would have been happy to let her know our check out time had she asked me through the airbnb site at least one day before.
When we saw her at the checkout time, she seemed irritated with us and again accused us having more guests than we booked, which is not the case. In fact, because some people had other travel plans, at the end of our stay we were fewer guests. Overall we felt unwelcome and like we were breaching her space even though we spent a significant amount of money to stay in the apartment for one week. I also think that the neighbours are not supportive of the apartment being used as an airbnb and will complain in order to make the situation difficult for the host. We have used airbnb through the whole extent of our three week study abroad university course, and have had awesome, positive experiences throughout. It was really sad that this was the only place we experienced a negative situation.