There were important amenities missing or unavailable.
1. It did not have "free parking on premises" as listed. Our group had to park our cars on the street outside, as there was a digger, dumper truck, pallets of blocks, sharp cutting equipment, etc., all over the place between the front door of the house and the front gate.
2. It did not have a "private patio or balcony". There were builders coming and going throughout the first of our three days. Someone's lunch was left on the patio table. We had no privacy in the space outside the house and we had to close the curtains to feel any sense of privacy inside the house.
3. Although it did have a "garden", the outside area was demonstrably unsafe (with stacks of blocks along the paved area, digger buckets, and an exposed manhole in the ground in the unfinished paved area), so we could not let our 4 year old play in the garden as we had planned to when we booked a house with a garden as advertised on the Airbnb listing.
4. At check in, the host said that he had asked the builders not to work Saturday and Sunday and had also promised to tell the builders to keep the noise down until after 10:00 on Friday. However, according to the polite builders that we spoke to on Friday afternoon - 7th April, the host did not inform the builders that the house would be occupied from Friday 7th to Sunday 10th April. The builders assumed that the house was still unoccupied and woke us all up at 07:47 on Friday morning, with a beeping digger and dumper truck, high pitched screeching as they cut the blocks on the driveway with an angle grinder, etc. They said they had been planning to continue with the work over the weekend but given that the house had paying guests, they would now be stopping on Friday (they left at 15:30) and would not return until we had left. They said the host should have cancelled them. We agreed. There were clearly health and safety risks all over the place.
5. The ”superhost” completely ignored our phone calls, text messages and WhatsApp messages and videos informing him that the builders were there at 07:47, creating a great deal of disturbance. He never contacted us again after check in. For all he knows, we took him up on his offer when we arrived to just spend one night, move somewhere else the next day, and get a full refund. We did look for alternative properties but could not find anywhere suitable at such short notice, as we were a group of 8 people.
6. There were several other problems with cleanliness/upkeep (unclean oven, some unclean dishes and utensils, blocked shower traps causing the bathrooms to flood if you didn’t stop the shower every 2 minutes and create a dam with towels on the floor) but these were not as serious as the abovementioned problems. I include them to demonstrate that the interior of the house also had some problems which we had to grapple with.
We were very disappointed and upset by all of this.
It could have been a really wonderful place to stay for our family reunion, and a place we might have returned to numerous times in the future. Unfortunately, things did not work out that way, mainly because the host chose to schedule building work on the driveway during our stay, failed to inform the builders that we were staying, and ignored our phone calls and messages when the builders woke us all up at 07:47 on Friday morning. Everyone in our group (and everyone else that we spoke to about this in the days that followed) thought that this was very inconsiderate behaviour.
Having read the glowing reviews from previous guests we were shocked and disappointed by this. We hope that this was a one off thing and that future guests do not have the same experience.