This apartment is beautiful, stylish and located in the best of all in the best possible locations of Copacabana with the beach merely meters away from the door, but unfortunately, I didn’t have a 5-star stay. Some opportunities with hosting would greatly increase my rating and experience.
Accuracy with listing: “Where you'll sleep”; The listing indicated 4 bedrooms. While the listing indicated 4 bedrooms, only 3 rooms were available with apartment. After inquiring, the host indicated that they needed a room to lock up personal items. When searching and selecting an apartment, I took note that there were 4 bedrooms with the listing. In my family there are 3 adults and 1 toddler. We were planning for each adult to have their own room and the toddler in a child’s room with toddler car bed (as seen in pictures). After booking, we were asked to make a decision which room we were going to give up giving the need to lock up personal items, again – the listing indicated 4 bedrooms, not three.
Another issue with the accuracy of the listing is with closet space. There was absolutely no closet space in the entire apartment. We had to leave our luggage and clothes on the floor. Every single closet, drawer, cabinet and/or cupboard was under lock and key. I have never seen anything like this – we had nowhere to put our clothes other than the floor. Looking at the images of the listing, one sees closet space, including some that are ajar – but not the case for our stay.
Cleanliness – Generally speaking the apartment was clean, but there were areas that definitely lacking the attention and had quite the accumulation of various human and animal hair. The apartment is ocean-facing and quite understandably, the apartment is exposed to sea breeze, which can be quite corrosive. But that’s not an issue here. The issue is that certain areas of the apartment, particularly with the bedrooms. We encountered surface areas that hadn’t been wiped down in a long time, human and dog hairs and a lot of dust. We contacted the host and provided photos of dusty areas and balls of hair found in certain areas of the apartment. Thankfully they were quick to send a maid over the next day to give these areas another cleaning.
Towels – The apartment came with a total of 4 bath towels. The master bedroom had two towels, bedroom #2 had two towels and bedroom #3 didn’t have any towels. I contacted the host, if bedroom #3 was supposed to have it’s set of 2 towels. The response I received was a little off-putting: I was asked if there were more guests than I indicated. My reply was that my guest count was exactly as I stated on the reservation, 3 adults and 1 toddler. The response back; I have enough towels for 3 adults and one toddler. Aside from only having 4 bath towels for 3 adults and 1 toddler; the towels were either brand new or poor quality- because upon drying the towels were shedding there fibers. It’s not a good experience to have tiny and large blue fibers all over your body after a shower. In an attempt to remedy the issue with the towels, we washed them but then was left with no towels for two days as it was a rainy week and it took over 2 days to completely dry the towels. We had to resort using out dirty clothes to dry ourselves.
WiFi – The apartment offers Wifi, however since the place is so big the signal doesn’t reach most of the apartment. The modem is located in the middle bedroom, giving coverage to the 3 bedrooms. The rest of the apartment, Kitchen and expansive living room doesn’t receive signal. Host should look at a Wifi range extender or mesh-network.
In sum, there was an atmosphere of distrust from the host. There was an excessive amount of communication which made way for an uncomfortable and problematic stay.