This stay was an interesting one.
I would say it was an example of a good property, let down by some problems with hosting.
I will say the property is in a good location, private and peaceful which is really nice for the stay.
It brings me some sadness to write a review like this, we were here on holiday wanting to enjoy ourselves. I have never had an experience like this before but I hope to share it to try and potentially protect someone else from having their holiday ruined as it did leave a bad taste on our stay for a couple days…
Some of the issues were:
- Being told that the property has a fully stocked kitchen (as we like to cook I really wanted to make sure).
Unfortunately however, no knives for chopping or cooking so had to make do with butter knives half the time. No kitchen roll. No coffee. No additional kitchen bin bags we had to buy our own or use shopping ones.
*when the host was asked about it they said “anything you need you have to buy from the mini market”.
Only 1 tea towel provided to clean the entire kitchen for our whole stay so needless to say one of the small towels had to be used after a couple days. Told we shouldn’t have done this as the towels are white….
- Host rudeness
When checking out the host’s partner (wife?) came in to start cleaning as we were leaving and out loud made remarks such as “what happened in here?! There was only 2 of you?!” And “wow where do I start?”
And this was because the used towels were on the bathroom floor and a couple breadcrumbs on the floor due to a lack of cleaning equipment.
She told us we were wrong to leave the full and tied up kitchen trash bag outside the door of the villa - but when challenged about having nowhere to put the trash - the hosts remarks where that the community large pick up bins are down the street and we should have known…
We did check out 20 mins delayed (hosts were messaged and apologised to due to delay) so perhaps if we hadn’t run in to a delay we wouldn’t have seen the host and therefore avoided her rudeness but that’s beside the point here in some ways… the property was also VACANT again for a few days but they were asking for €20 for an extra 120 min to check out. 90% of hosts I have encountered with a totally vacant property wouldn’t even charge for this.
- when discussing check in/check out options the host had initially said it’s very tight because they are fully booked all month. Then when we asked for a later check out they asked if we wanted to stay more and what dates we might want as apparently “it’s mostly fully booked but with some spaces”. Which made us feel a bit uncomfortable.
Lastly - on arrival the directions given by the post do not take you to the home. They take you to the street a couple hundred metres away.
When I called the host (husband?) he said “have you followed the directions” and simply sent the same directions again, which were exactly the same.
It seemed as if he wasn’t sure where the property even was as he couldn’t describe where to go from the local restaurant so the (wife?) host came down to take us 150metres.
This could have easily been described on the phone it was super simple just tucked away.
Ultimately there is a LOT of potential for this place.
However as I told the hosts: they are thinking like business people and only from their perspective.
In order for this place to improve they need to adopt the perspective of a guest otherwise the hosting is intolerable and there are plenty more welcoming options.