The day before arriving in Rio I was notified by Franchesca that we would not be staying in the apartment we originally booked, but instead we would be staying in this beachfront beauty. When we arrived they were still cleaning the apartment and someone(other than Franchesca or Frederic) came to make sure we had arrived and to take the names of the three other students that had come to Rio as part of my MBA cohort.
At first everything was great, there were a few things damaged in the apartment when we got there (broken door knob, one of the bathrooms didn't have light, one sofa looked slanted) nothing major and since we were obviously not the first ppl to stay their I didn't want to make a big deal about it so I only reached out to her about the most important issue which was the bathroom not having lights. Never got a response, nor was it ever fixed.
Not reaching out immediately about some of the broken things proved to be a huge mistake. While I had paid the apartment through my airbnb account, the apartment was going to be shared by four ppl. Since there were only three bedrooms I would share a room with one of my cohort members and the other two ppl (whom wanted their privacy) would have their own room.
At the beginning everything was fine. The cleaning lady would come sometimes every 7 days sometimes every 10 days. Which was great! The view every morning was amazing!! BUT the morning before we had to leave brazil I got a message from Franchesca requesting that we vacate the apartment before 12 am the next day because they had other guest coming and that she had been informed that we had damaged a few things in the apartment and that she wanted us to figure out how we were going to pay for the damages. I had no knowledge of anything being damaged (other then the things that were already damaged when we got there).
I met Franchesca at the apartment. There I found a full house of people already cleaning and repairing the light in the bathroom (the one they never cared to fix while we were staying there for 35 nights.) A very irate Franchesca walked in about 10 minutes later screaming at me and asking me to sign a paper that made me responsible for everything damaged in the apartment regardless of if it was damaged by us or not. When I questioned some of the things on the list that were not correct(for example all three mattress soaked in urine and need professional dry cleaning) she told me she didn't care and that if i didn't sign the paper right now she was going to call the cops and have me arrested and I would not be able to go home the following day. I tried to argue with her but was afraid of getting arrested in a foreign country.