The apartment was large and beautiful, and we were very impressed when we arrived. We were allowed to check in early, which was very helpful. It’s on a nice and quiet street. We got a tour from the owner and she explained that she controls the temperature from an app on her phone, and we asked if she could turn the temperature up from 20 to 22 as it is a large ground floor apartment and it was around 6-7 degrees Celsius at night and in the mornings. We could tell she didn’t particularly want to turn it up for us, but she tried with the app and it wasn’t working. Later we messaged the property manager, Justin, and he asked her to turn up the temperature and she was able to do so.
For a few days, the temperature was fine, still a bit cold at 22, but much better than before. One morning, we noticed that it was turned back down to 20 degrees. It was noticeably colder in the apartment. We’re not sure if it happened automatically somehow or if the apartment owner turned it down. We sent a message to Justin inquiring about it and the message implied that she turned down the temperature to save money, which she took great offense to. Perhaps that’s not true, but we got this impression when we first arrived as she seemed hesitant to turn it up and we also discovered the refrigerator was set to 18 degrees instead of the usual 4-5 degrees. The message clearly offended the owner because she came down shortly after it was sent and knocked on the door (she lives in the same building). My girlfriend opened the door and the owner came in without our permission and was angrily scolding her in French for about 5-10 minutes about how offensive the message was etc. It was a very unfortunate and extremely upsetting situation, especially because it was my girlfriend’s birthday that day. Obviously we didn’t feel comfortable in the apartment after that happened, and we spent the afternoon packing to move to a hotel.
The owner left a bottle of wine and a note outside the door to apologize and Justin was extremely kind and apologetic about what happened. He offered to help us cancel the rest of our stay so we could move to a hotel. It was a shocking situation all around, but Justin was very helpful to us. He mentioned that the owner will not be involved with the guests anymore after what happened with us. We asked for a full refund for our stay and they agreed. The apartment was nice and what happened with the owner is very unfortunate, but Justin was truly great and we are thankful for his help and for the refund.