The apartment was clean and had a good location. However, there are numerous issues to consider before renting this place.
First of all, the key had to be retrieved from a bartender at an out of the way anonymous bar—Malcolm was not available to meet at the spot previously designated—luckily I had a driver that knew Dublin and had a GPS. A prior review alluded to the fact that the location of the apartment is never divulged.
Secondly, the location of the apartment itself was not made clear—my driver and I had to walk around the neighborhood with my luggage for 5 minutes before we accidentally found the apartment building. This could have easily been communicated by Malcolm.
The cleaning lady was an hour late in getting the apartment ready because Malcolm had not told her that we needed the second bedroom set up as a single and she had to go retrieve the sheets from another location.
There was no bar soap in the entire apartment and insufficient toilet paper so we had to go straight to the store and buy those supplies ourselves.
The second bedroom window was inoperable—there was no way to close it and there was excessive noise from loud talking neighbors and continual dog barking. I slept with earplugs so it was not a problem for me but it might be a big problem for someone else.
We could not figure out how to open the door to the washer—I texted Malcolm and of course received no response until late the following day, so we could not use the machine. His response was “open the door”. I am sure that the handle was broken—I know how to open a washer door.
There is one other major issue regarding departure—a key fob is required to exit the building. There are no explicit instructions on how and where to leave the keys and the key is required to get out of the door. I asked Malcolm about this and he said “just drop the key in his mail slot”. Unfortunately his mail slot is in a different building and the exit building requires the key fob. If this sounds confusing it is. If my friend and I had not figured out how to have her hold the exit door open in the other building we would have been stuck.
These problems would be easily solved if the owner was on top of things so please take all of this into consideration. This place used to get 5 star ratings all of the time—that is why I booked it. Obviously things have changed and not for the better