The apartment itself is fine, but we had had a poor experience here due to problems with maintenance, cleanliness, and most significantly, the unsatisfactory resolution of our issues by the property manager (Cedric of Click Your Flat.)
My goal is that this review, although specific to our experience, is helpful to potential future guests. I’ll start by sharing our experience, and allow you to form your own opinion as to how the situation was handled. I'll finish with unbiased pros/cons of this apartment.
We booked a 5 night stay in December. Upon arrival at 3pm, we immediately realized there was a maintenance issue with the door lock as we were unable to remove the key from the exterior door after unlocking it. I messaged Cedric, the property manager, who responded within a few minutes saying to move the handle up and down and it should work. This did not work, there was clearly an issue with the lock, which I communicated to Cedric. Over an hour later, at 4:20pm, he told me that a technician would arrive at 5pm to fix the lock. During this time, we were unable to securely close the exterior door to the apartment, which opened to a shared outdoor space. This felt somewhat unsafe, as well as made the apartment very cold.
Unfortunately this is where things took a turn for the worst. As we were waiting for the technician in the cold apartment, unable to leave because we could not close or lock the door, I started noticing long, black hairs on the floors in various rooms, and even on the kitchen counter. Because of this, I inspected the apartment more carefully and realized that it had not been cleaned prior to our stay. There were large clumps of hair on the floor behind both bedroom and bathroom doors, and dirty footprints on the floor. Only one bathroom had toilet paper. The bed that my daughter was resting on had small blood stains on the covers. There were half used toiletries in both showers. The last straw was when I realized that the bathroom trash had not been taken out, and found the can nearly overflowing with the previous guests tissues, Q tips, make-up remover wipes, etc. At this point I was quite upset and messaged Cedric to express our concerns with cleanliness. I also sent several pictures. (Please note that Cedric committed to AirBnB’s 5 Step Cleaning Process, as stated in the listing. I take cleanliness very seriously, particularly during a global pandemic. Cedric’s commitment to cleanliness was one of the reasons we chose this apartment.)
Via message, Cedric apologized and said he is also sending cleaners, who will arrive at 5pm, along with the technician. By 5:30pm, no one had arrived. The technician arrived at 6pm, and spent an entire hour working on the various parts of the doorknob and lock to fix it. During this time we were still unable to leave or close the exterior door of the apartment.
Around 6:15pm, Cedric messaged to say that the cleaner had an issue and was unable to come until 10am the following day. Then he said it will be “sometime after 10am.”
At this point we were frantically searching for other places nearby to stay the night, but as it was a holiday weekend in Paris, there was nothing available.
Later that evening, I think around 8pm, there was a loud knock on the door. I opened it to find an unfamiliar man, who introduced himself as Cedric. He was wearing a motorcycle helmet and my first thought was that he was a policeman. My husband was at the store so I was alone in the apartment with 2 small children and felt uncomfortable. He said he came to see if the lock was fixed. I had already communicated that in a message but he said he did not see the messages as he was on his moped. He apologized for the issues then left.
We slept in the dirty apartment as there were no other feasible options. We went out the following morning to sightsee and upon our return in the afternoon, found the cleanliness improved, although I still noticed several things (the stained covers had not been changed, there was still a large hairball on the floor, the dining room table still had sticky food on it, indicating it had not been wiped down.) To be fair, perhaps I only noticed these things as I had been closely inspecting the apartment the night before. I didn't wish to have any further disruptions to our trip, so I told Cedric the cleaning was satisfactory and did not request any further cleaning. However, I did reiterate my disappointment with the entire situation, and my feelings that our trip had been disrupted due to the issues at the apartment.
Cedric apologized again via message and offered to refund my cleaning fee. I appreciated that, but did not feel it was sufficient as we missed an entire afternoon/evening in Paris due to the maintenance issue, plus had to sleep in a very unclean apartment during a pandemic. I requested that Cedric refund our first night stay as well (to be clear, I requested a refund for ONE of 5 nights). He replied no, he had already apologized. After that, I simply stated that I planned to open a case with AirBnb upon our return home. Cedric became angry and accused me of threatening him (about opening the case), also telling me we had to pay for the night because “we slept there.” In my opinion, I was not threatening, but simply informing him. The communication deteriorated from there. I felt all of the communication on my end was firm but very polite, and that I was very reasonable in my request based on what we had experienced on our first night in the apartment. I’m not sure if there was also a language/cultural difference but my request was very poorly received and Cedric continued