OUR STAY: My husband and I were in Paris for 2 months for both work and play.
THE GOOD: This apartment is in an excellent location. The street itself is quiet and residential but within minutes, you can walk to lively and bustling neighborhoods with restaurants and bars. We loved the location! There’s plenty of hot water, and the wifi works well. The listed host, Veronique, was also pleasant to interact with.
THE BAD: The apartment was not clean or well-maintained. The apartment cleanliness level was at a 3 out of 10 compared to other Airbnbs we have stayed in (20 stays in the last three years). Dishes and were cracked or broken, there was black mold in the bathroom, the sink drained slowly, the sheets had hair all over them, the floor was horribly dirty (our feet were black after 2 hours in the apartment), and the metal curtain rod was broken and fell on my husband’s head.
But what was worse is that the place reeked horribly of cigarette smoke when we arrived. We first cleaned everything ourselves (so that we could even spend one night), and then called a cleaning service where a professional cleaner spent 5 hours (and 200 Euros) cleaning all the surfaces and fabrics in the apartment to get the smoke smell out. Disgusting! We engaged a maid service again multiple times through our stay and definitely returned the apartment cleaner than we had received it.
THE TERRIBLE: All of the above seems minor in comparison to the interactions we endured with the house sitter. The day we arrived, he left us out in the cold (literally!) for 2.5 hours with no response on his phone to multiple calls and texts by us or the AirBnB host. When he finally came out of the building, he proceeded to blame us for his phone being broken, yelled at me and my husband, and was rude. The apartment wasn’t ready even though we were actually supposed to arrive the night before (and informed them in plenty of time). He yelled as us for showing up early for check-in (even though we’d already paid for the previous night). He was aggressive and kept taking steps towards us. We chalked this up to him having a hard day, and didn't give it another thought. The two other interactions we had with him (to get small repairs to the apartment – see clogged drains above), he was fine with my husband.
However, the last 24 hours of our stay were the worst, where in two interactions, he demonstrated that he had no control over his temper and ran after me onto the landing yelling at me in anger when I had decided I wasn’t going to engage with him. I think he has a serious issue with women. If I was traveling by myself, I would have been scared to be in the apartment alone with him.