My husband and I stayed in August 2021 for a few days. We found Alessandra’s place to be lovely, it’s located in the center of bologna in a nice historic building. The place is very spacious with high ceilings, and is both well decorated and clean. Alessandra also kindly accommodated our request to check in at 12:30 and not the standard 15:00. Unfortunately however, we did not have a very positive experience for two main reasons:
1. There is ‘effectively’ no AC in the bedroom and this makes it completely unbearable to sleep at night in the middle of August. To be fair and clear, there is an AC unit and it’s meant to turn on automatically when the room reaches a certain temperature (24 degrees Celsius is the coldest setting). But, at no point did it ever turn on during our stay (even when the temp outside was 35 degrees and it felt unbearably hot inside). So, even if we give it the benefit of the doubt and say that the AC was functioning perfectly and the issue was that the room temp never triggered the AC sensor, it doesn’t change the fact that the room felt so hot that we couldn’t sleep at night during our stay. That said, from reading other reviews, I suspect this might be a systemic issue and there is something not working properly with that AC.
2. Alessandra delegated to a woman named Catalina (the third person I had to contact after Filippo and AnnaLaura had various other issues). Catalina was completely unresponsive after check in. We raised the AC issue above during our stay multiple times and she did not respond (despite having read the messages on WhatsApp). She also did not get back to us about the request for extra time to check out even though she had promised during the check in that she would check and get back to us. In the absence of any communication or response to our queries, we assumed that this would be okay so we took an extra 30 mins to check out (11:30 instead of 11 am). When I messaged Catalina to let her know that we had checked out and to kindly give her a heads up about this review, she said she would “report it [the late check out] in case we will see a review left from you”.
That response made me wonder, are reviews for this Airbnb largely positive because guests get threatened otherwise with retaliation?
In any case, it made me more determined to leave a truly honest review. So, here it is: overall, there’s a lot to like about Alessandra’s place and I would have loved to stay again if it wasn’t for the AC issue and lack of responsiveness by the delegated person after check in.