The unit is beautiful, centrally located and has a great view. It does smell like sewage, but it went away after a couple days. Not sure if it’s because I got used to it or if the problem resolved itself.
However, while I don’t like to leave critical reviews, I want to forewarn other solo or female traveler like myself before coming here given my experience with the host, which made my arrival a disaster (luckily it was midday) and made me feel incredibly unsafe.
I have used Airbnb since it’s inception and had wonderful experiences and kept in touch with many hosts. So this terrible experience is definitely not the norm.
Right off the bat, the host insisted on communicating via private messenger apps instead of on Airbnb, which for safety reasons goes against the Airbnb policy. I asked about this repeatedly and was ignored.
Then my host arranged an airport pickup, which i thought was nice and thoughtful, until it didn’t take me to the Airbnb, and just left me in the street & told me to figure it out myself from there. I was so shocked, i still paid the guy, even though I shouldn’t have. I was in complete shock. I was not warned this would happen, nor did I know how to find my unit from there because I was promised transportation to the unit.
As a seasoned traveler, I pulled the address from the posting and used maps, but this also provided no help and didn’t take me to the unit. The host said the address didnt work in maps, because maps don’t work in Mykonos, but I had no problem with maps at any other point in my trip, once I had the accurate location of the unit. I was starting to worry I’d been scammed at this point.
Ultimately it took a couple hours of collaborating with locals using pictures of the unit from the post to find it. The whole situation drained my phone battery, drained me, and made me feel scammed.
The literal job description for transportation or airport pickup is to deliver you to the agreed upon destination. When the driver left me in the street and did not deliver me to the Airbnb, he failed to follow through on the service he and the host agreed to provide.
Through all of this I was messaging the host asking for help, who was not interested to help and blamed me for the issue because I arrived before the posted “check-in” time even though I arrived at the exact time we communicated & agreed upon prior to my arrival. And I had the messages and screenshots to back it up.
The host refused to help, and continued wanting to communicate via private messenger apps or email, but given the development of events, I demanded communication in the Airbnb app to document the situation and protect myself.
I was stranded and my phone nearly dead. So I went to a nearby restaurant and charged my phone and contacted Airbnb, gave them the details, screenshots of conversations, all the receipts. And after a couple expensive international calls, they got the host to show up and let me in. I was just lucky I even had an international phone plan, as I mention later, the other girls staying w/ this same host, encountering similar troubles, didn’t have that option.
It was a disaster and the host continued to blame me, but I reiterate that he agreed to my arrival time and he offered the pickup, then failed to follow through. And i had it all in writing.
The two girls who stayed in the unit below me had similar trouble with the host. They ended up coming to me for help because they also did not receive proper check-in details prior to arrival. It was stressful for them because they arrived in the middle of the night without any informational about how to enter the unit prior, and no wifi password to connect to the unit’s internet in order to communicate with the host to get in since their phones didn’t work in Greece. Being locked out of the unit, with no method of communication, at night in a foreign country, is terrifying as a woman and showed no forethought or planning on the part of the host anticipating guests.
The unit is great, but the poor experience from the hosts of the hosts negate that.