First of all, let me just say that the Erol and Jay are great hosts and good communication.
On to the real stuff, they may have other decent listings but make sure you do your research before booking a specific location. I would not send even my most hated person in the world to the 175 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest listing.
Let me take you through my experience. I booked for 4 nights, made it through 1 night only.
Day 1: The building is decrepit, the hallway itself smells like dead human remains. Halfway down the hallway is unmaintained, moulded and infested with insects. Inside the unit was beautifully decorated, but the bed was horrible. The mattress felt like it was repurposed from the dump. Within 2 hours of check-in, I returned to the room and found a cockroach crawling on the kitchen island on my muffin. (More on this later) Crushed it with my muffin unfortunately and tossed that. I thought, one-off situation I hope and continued with my night. Brought my own clean sheet to put OVER the bed and pillows and my own blanket that I luckily had extra in my car. By the end of the night, nothing else yet besides the AC unit that was leaking hard onto the floor and mold/massive hole in the wall next to it. I went to bed, woke up with what I later found to be a bug bite on my chin. (The thought that maybe a cockroach crawled over my face literally haunts me).
Day 2: I woke up, went to the washroom, found a cockroach on rim of the bathtub. Flushed it down the drain with hot water and plugged the drain. Side note - My girlfriend asked me if it was a cockroach, I lied and said no not to freak her out. I thought it’d be the last one I’d see and we’d deal with the rest of the trip. Plugged the drain at all times. Went out the rest of the day. Came back at night, prepared to go to bed. Sat down on the stool for a second… noticed a black speck on the headboard of the bed. Thought I was just paranoid from the previous 2 cockroaches. Not even 30 seconds later, I saw that black speck move… I jumped up and moved closer and saw it was a cockroach that was now crawling over the bed.
Needless to say, we were done with this place. 1:50AM. Changed and packed all of our bags in less than 5 minutes. Looked for any available hotel who would allow late checkin… otherwise we would have had to sleep in the car. By 2:15AM., we found a very low-budget Days Inn that was not the greatest but seemed like a luxury resort compared to this AirBNB with no cockroaches. While we were packing our bags… coincidentally there was ANOTHER cockroach crawling on the ceiling above the kitchen. This confirmed our impulse to leave. The parking given is just as bad, belongs to this building with no room to maneuver, garbage and bugs flying and crawling EVERYWHERE. It’s next to the laundry room and it smells like sickness.
In the morning, I tried contacting the hosts, was responded to by their call-taker. Pretty good communication, advised I’d likely be compensated. Asked if I had photos, but never crossed my mind to take photos. Reported to Airbnb to protect myself, went back to the unit to try and take photos and found the unit was ALREADY FULLY CLEANED. WIthin 2 hours of me speaking to this call-taker who said he was their cleaner with his sister, the unit was already cleaned, everything put in order and my muffin in the garbage with the crushed cockroach was gone. Not sure if this was a coincidence or if they were trying to save face by not having photos.
At the end of the day, they were very good in terms of giving me most of my money back. Call-taker said “I’m sure you’ll get your money back, this is something they’d trust you with.” Maybe because it’s happened before and I didn’t get a chance to take photos of all the cockroaches?
In conclusion, this listing literally haunts me and my girlfriend. Now every time I see something crawling at the corner of my eye, we keep thinking it’s a cockroach. I was given my money back for the Airbnb minus half of the first night. Extremely terrible Airbnb experience at this location but decent hosts.
My only issue is half of their responses seemed like automated responses?
Never did I think I needed to leave at 2AM to find a hotel FAR from downtown Montreal where I wanted to stay. I ended up having to fork over just as much money. This literally ruined my Montreal experience and set the mood for the rest of the trip. Not even a sorry, it was all business, return some money and send me on my way.