I do not recommend this apartment at all! Please save yourself the trouble!! My family and I are absolutely appalled and disgusted with how Paola treated us on numerous occasions which I will explain after i talk about the condition of the apartment.
Her apartment was quite nice and stylish however there is a terrible odour that persisted the whole time we were there! Every room of the house smelt like toilet water which the bedroom smelling the worst! Possibly due to a blocked sewage pipe!! We woke up multiple times at night and felt light-headed and like we couldn’t breathe! The only way to reduce the smell is to open the windows! We did this but in the middle of winter the cold air isn’t nice!!!
Now for Paola’s behaviour:
Firstly, Paola has a checkin time for her apartment at 11am and on the 12th of January 2019 we agreed for an arrival time of 3:45pm. Prior to arriving Paola mentioned an extra fee of €3.50 per person as apart of a “Rome City Tax.” However, I misread her message and didn’t realise this city tax was also Per Day thus totalling to €56! Therefore when we arrived at the apartment we were only prepared to give her one day tax: €14. I explained to her this misunderstanding and even though we had paided for the whole apartment well in advance she was not happy that we didn’t have the total 56 in cash and decided to kick us out of the apartment, even though she allowed our luggage to remain. Furthermore, at all the other airBnb apartments my family and I have stayed at the hosts have all asked for city tax to be paid at the end of our stay! Therefore we were kicked out of the apartment at 4:15pm as Paola had to go out and said that we wouldn’t be allowed back into the apartment until 8pm “so we could learn a lesson”. And to tell us she arrive she simply tapped on the back window of the car without saying a word and walked off expecting us to quickly jump and run after her! By the time we got out of the car she was already in the apartment and we had no clue which one she went Into!!! How rude!!
Therefore we spent 4hours at night time in an area of Rome we were not familiar with after 3 hours of a tiring drive from Perugia! In this 4 hours, we walked to a bank to withdraw 20euro and then back to the apartment to find the gate to the apartment was locked! So we had to wait 30min in 2degrees Celsius outside the apartment for a neighbour to unlock the gate so we could get to the safety of our car where we spent the remaining 3 hours!!! We are very appalled with this circumstance that Paola caused us to be in! A more sane person would have allowed us to stay in the apartment WITH OUR LUGGAGE and collected the remaining city tax at 8pm after they “had to go out” instead of leaving a family of 4 in the cold at night time just to prove a point!!
Even she knows this was wrong and tried to make up for it by wanting us to extend our check-out time to the night time on January 16th even though she knew we had a flight out of Rome at 12:30pm!!
Furthermore at the end of our appointment, Paola is not saying we have caused damage to the walls of her apartment and she has taken pictures to prove the damage we have supposedly done! I saw the pictures and the damage she was talking about was already present BEFORE we used the apartment! I know this because I noted the damage to her walls during our stay. I noticed indents in her front door that were exactly the same height of a chair located nearby it. And the chair had anti-scratch pads at the exact same height of those scratches! This tells me two things. 1. The scratches were made when the anti-scratch pads on the chair was NOT present and therefore I couldn’t have done them!! Besides, my family and I only used the to sleep and shower and didn’t spend our time running forcefully into walls to make scratches like the ones we saw!! We would have had to be running really hard!
We are really disturbed by her harassment of us and cannot fathom why on earth she is causing this hassle besides it being the same reason for her treating us with contempt by kicking us out of her apartment at the very beginning or her trying to make extra money off of us by claiming false damage reports!
I assert strongly that we took the upmost care with Paola’s apartment even vacuuming her floors, putting all the used towels for her in the washer ready to go, made all the beds and emptied all her bins!!
We hope that AirBnb could do something about Paola’s behaviour as we don’t want other travellers to go through this experience. It was the worst way to end a beautiful 2 month trip in Italy and left us feeling disturbed and hesitant about using airbnb when hosts can behave so appallingly and accuse so freely!