I had an absolutely horrible stay at this Airbnb and with the host. Communication with the host was terrible and slow. He ignored many of my messages, only responding when he had to speak about payment. I asked for recommendations in Athens and was ignored. Even when issues arose during my stay, he took long to reply and failed to address them successfully.
There was no wifi or heating, cockroaches in the bedrooms, and ants crawling all around the kitchen counters when I first checked in. I messaged Sarantis to let him know and asked for help. He replied the next day saying he would send his cleaning lady to spray the ants in the kitchen and resolve the WiFi issues. She left us with a portable WiFi device, but it didn’t work when we tried connecting to it. I messaged Sarantis again to let him know. His suggestions were extremely unhelpful. He told me to turn off all devices except for one and only use one device on the WiFi or simply keep trying to connect (which I had already done multiple times before contacting him). He then said he would come in person to help with the issues, but his cleaning lady showed up instead. She told us she did not know why the WiFi wasn’t working and couldn’t help us. So for 2 nights, we had no WiFi at all, which was a big issue as we were running out of cellular data.
During this time, there were still cockroaches all over the place. They were in the shower, kitchen, and bedrooms. When I told Sarantis I saw more, he kept asking me clarifying questions as if I was lying to him. He pushed me about what bugs they were exactly, what they looked like, where I found them. He told me there should be no bugs because the cleaning lady didn’t mention anything besides the ants in the kitchen.
There was also absolutely no information provided to us about the home, besides where the key was left. He failed to tell us how to turn on the hot water, so we had to take cold showers. Liquid soap bottles provided in the bathroom were either more than half empty or had a large amount of water in them. There was also no information on how to use the heating system, which was very confusing to figure out on our own. When I asked him about the heating, he told me to just click the sun button, but there wasn’t even a sun button on the remote.
The only time Sarantis actually came to the premises himself and put in effort to resolving our issues was after we had contacted Airbnb support. We ended up wasting an entire day of our vacation waiting for him to come to the Airbnb and dealing with the situation. Not once did he ever apologize for the inconveniences we experienced.
When he came to the Airbnb, he recorded us without our permission, argued with us, was hostile, and blamed us for the problems by saying we should’ve figured it out ourselves. He told us to close the windows to prevent the cockroaches from coming in, even though we already had. He made me and my party feel extremely unsafe; he raised his voice at us and accused us of lying to Airbnb support. Even now, he refuses to provide a full refund or compensation for the Airbnb stay.
Airbnb customer support was also very unhelpful, as I couldn’t get through to any of the lines to speak with someone about this situation. I was on the phone calling for over 12 hours that day, trying to receive help but every time I spoke with someone, they would put me on hold for 2 hours, tell me they can’t do anything for me/can’t transfer me to anyone, or that they would call back with an update within a few minutes (and then never did). At 11pm, we still didn’t have a new place to stay because we hadn’t heard anything from Airbnb or received support with booking a new Airbnb, so we had to find a new place ourselves and pay out of pocket. It’s been almost 2 weeks since the incident and I am still in contact with Airbnb support as none of my concerns have been addressed.