This house is a trap.
I say that not in the sense that you are in danger, or that it will utterly ruin your experience in Belize. What I know after my stay at the Monkey Pedestal House is that I will forever question if even the best looking listings can live up to what they’re offering.
Much of the listing information is accurate – the house is remote, it is relatively near to activities, and the house is nice inside.
The free airport transfer seems to only sweeten the deal. With that, the trap is set. If you get a free ride to the house you probably don’t need a car, right?
Wrong.
My family and I were actually on our way back to the airport in BZE with a few days to spare. I found this listing while looking for good places near Belize City to pass a few days. We already had a ride over to the house, so I swapped our free airport transfer pickup to a drop-off (or so I thought) and started making plans.
It turns out the host Adrienne is a tour guide with a website and everything Great! Except not great. I have two small children who are not keen on organized tours. I explained that to our host in terms of why I didn’t think booking with him would work, and communication went dark for several days.
After repeated requests for contact info for any drivers in the area (the bus only comes through once a day and there are no taxi stands) our host sent me the number for a taxi driver in Belize City who wanted USD $150 to go anywhere. Conveniently that was the same price as the cheapest tour on our hosts site.
I relented and booked the ruins tour with our host for a Tuesday – thinking that would at least make things easier for making arrangements for our own Monday outing.
Sunday/check-in day came and we actually got to check in early. I’d messaged a few days before about dropping bags before check-in and was given the go ahead as no guests were at the house. After I checked in I was told our host was “looking for transport” for us to get the 2 miles to our next days destination. Two miles on me is nothing, but on my three year old it’s impossible. No transport was ever found and I ended up knocking on doors to find a ride. The listing suggests that the host can help with trasnportation personally – and reviews seem to back this up. It did not happen for us, and I began to wonder at that point if anyone had really gotten a ride for anything besides our hosts tours.
Monday was also the day our host asked how I wanted to pay for our airport transfer. I pointed out that we were staying for over two nights and qualified for the free airport transfer he advertises here on AirBnB. He responded that the free transport is only for airport pickups. I reminded him that in my very first message to him for the booking I had said that I wanted to swap my free airport pickup to a free drop-off and his response had been “we can provide you with our shuttle service for the day you check out” - with no mention of having to pay. It was the free transport that had actually won me over on the booking, and if he’d told me two weeks before that I couldn’t swap the free transport for a drop-off I wouldn’t have booked with him at all. His response “I did not say anything about providing you with a free airport drop off service”
He just let me think that it would be free until I’d already been trapped by the booking, arranged a tour with him for lack of anything else accessible from the house, and waited until I had no other way to get from the house to the airport to tell me that actually, I have to pay.
I asked him to explain the legitimate difference between a pickup and a dropoff. He came back with some inane reasoning that pickups are on “his time” but drop-offs are on “my time” and that for a drop-off it’s harder because you have to be at the airport by a specific time (like you don’t expect to be picked up by a specific time in the other situation?) and to top it off, he added that somehow driving from his home to the airport, to the AirBnB, is “far cheaper” than the drive from home to the AirBnB, to the airport – even though it is the same physical distance traveled.
Oh, and the tour I had booked with him for Tuesday. He picked us up and dropped us off. Our guide was good, but it was a local – not our host. He was not our guide, it was not his tour.
I can only recommend against booking here.