Excellent location, stylish apartment with beautiful view, comfy bed. Overall a good experience!
The only things that take away from a 5 star experience were:
- the stairwell is very, very dark and the motion sensor lights do not turn on until you’re already walking down the stairs, so you likely need to use your phone light before you take the first few steps.
- it was extremely hot in the apartment. I’m used to not having AC during summer travels in Europe, but for some reason this stay felt particularly brutal. The host was very responsive and dropped off an Airco unit right away which was great, except the unit will blow a small amount of cold air out the front and then a large amount of hot air out the back, so it actually made the overall room even hotter even after leaving it running over night. A simple plug-in fan would be sufficient for this and likely more effective than the airco.
- Some of the lights didn’t work or needed a bulb replacement. I notified the host but this wasn’t taken care of during my stay.
- The door didn’t always lock behind me. I’m not sure why this was, but sometimes it would lock and sometimes it wouldn’t.
There is no deadbolt or chain lock so just be aware of this. I felt really safe here so I don’t anticipate anyone having a problem, but as a solo female traveler a second type of lock provides an extra element of security.
Everything listed here is easily fixable. Overall it’s a good unit in a wonderful city!
Two final things to note:
- Many of the best restaurants actually require dinner reservations a few days ahead of time, even if it’s just one person dining, so be prepared.
- If you need to take the train to the airport in Brussels (or for anything), make sure to use the tram to get there and either get a ticket for the tram beforehand, or be prepared to pay with your card once you get on. I had a really stressful experience trying to get to the train station at 6am in order to make a 7am train to the airport. I planned on just taking an Uber but for some odd reason every Uber request that I placed was cancelled by the driver… this has never happened to me before.
It is a 40min walk so wasn’t going to do that with all my luggage when it’s still dark out. I then called multiple taxi companies and they either didn’t answer or were backed up with ride requests and wouldn’t be able to get to me on time. There was no phone number for me to contact the bnb host for advice so my only other option was to try and figure out how to ride the tram but once I got to the tram stop the box to buy a tram ticket didn’t work and I read online that tram use is contactless and you can’t just pay the driver when you board. Luckily, a drunk young man wondering home saw me in distress and offered to help and showed me how I can pay on board with my card and he then escorted me to the station. Bless him!
Using the tram is actually very easy now that I know how, just plan yourself out to use the tram for any transportation outside of walking instead of relying on Uber or cab.