After reading through all the glowing reviews of No Hipster we booked this place 6 months in advance and were very excited to come visit! However our experience at No Hipster seems to have been very different from everyone else’s . Having stayed at over 15 Air BnBs we are sorry to say that this has been the most disappointing of our stays. It’s difficult to say this because the host, Emi, is a really lovely knowledgeable host. The most friendly and helpful Air BnB host of all Air BnBs we’ve stayed at in the past.
We had to unfortunately leave our stay early due to receiving lots of severe bug bites from the accomodation.
Hopefully our account of our experience and clarification of some of the description items will help some people.
Pros:
-Lift to take up to the 7th floor which is handy when you have heavy luggage. There are around 5-10 steps to get to the level that lifts are on though.
-Functional kitchen for guests to cook when food is so expensive in Rome!
-Knowledgeable host- Emi spent his time introducing Rome and the Pigneto area to us which was much appreciated. He even sent a super detailed list of recommended shops for pastries, meat lovers, vegetarians, ice cream shops etc. Really lovely guy!
-Fleixble check in times
-free bike - we were excited to see the listing mention the use of free bikes to explore the city. Emi messaged us 2 days before our arrival regarding the bikes. The bikes are shared between all the guests unless guests rent them out for 5 euros per person per day . Note that the bikes are not just available for the guests of the 3 rooms at No Hipster. The bikes are also shared with another property that the hosts have. So unfortunately when we arrived there were no bikes left but it’s nice to know they’re on offer!
-free breakfast- there are free breakfast items. From memory, There’s the Italian pre-toasted bread in individual plastic packaging, a loaf of bread, oats, corn flakes, hazelnut spread, juice and a few other items. If there are lots of guests the bread may run out fast though so there wasn’t any bread left the 2nd morning.
To note:
-The apartment has 3 rooms rented out. The room we stayed in did not have any of the images up on the Air BnB listing. It is a room with no walls painted , a shirt hanging from the ceiling , a window which overlooks the spaghetti freeways and a mattress propped on top of crates.
-Cleanliness- the room was very dusty. We purchased additional cleaning products at our own expense as well as used existing cleaning products at the apartment to sweep, mop and disinfect surfaces. We noticed the bed spread was super dusty when wearing black clothes and laying on the surface
-Tick bug bites- we received pretty severe bug bites on our legs, forearms, hands and face . We believe these may be due to the listing allowing pets however the room not being thoroughly cleaned between bookings. These are the worst bug bites we’ve ever received - the kind which are large, angry and leave fluid filled blisters which get infected. As a result of this we didn’t stay the entire duration of the booking. The hosts were apologetic when we told them about this issue and offered to change the bed sheets however we don’t believe the bugs were localised to just the bed.
-Bathroom issues (note, shared bathroom among all 3 rooms)- moldy wall in bathroom. Soap scum marks clearly visible on bathtub indicating it hasn’t been cleaned in a while. The shower is the kind where it’s combined with the bathtub. There is a plastic shower guard wall to keep shower head water from spraying over the bathtub onto the floor. However due to part of the wall jutting out over the bathtub, it leaves very little room to move when washing . The shower guard is very dirty. Difficult to regulate the temperature of the shower water - it gets hot very slowly , then when you adjust the temperature it plummets to cold rather fast. To make the water warm again you have to close the tap and restart the reheating process which is time consuming when the shower head design doesn’t spray much water through the nozzles . The toilet flush isn’t very strong so if you’re lucky it takes about 3 flushes to get waste and toilet paper down the toilet bowl. The amount of dust and the dirt on the floor immediately becomes apparent when the floor gets wet. The host does the cleaning of the apartment but this isn’t necessarily on a daily basis from what we noticed during our 2 day’s here. The cleaning fee we were charged was $9 which doesn’t seem to have gone to much cleaning.
-double bed. At the time of writing this review, the listing icon states it’s a queen sized bed but the description states a double bed. To avoid confusion the bed is a double sized bed.
If I were to revisit Rome I would book a different Air BnB
Hopefully this review helps others