Don’t go there if you arrive late as you might not get in - We had a late flight on a Sunday evening, scheduled to land in Rome at 23:40. Previously, we had informed Maria Lucia, our host about this and she acknowledged it. Half an hour before departure, Wizzair texted us that our flight was delayed 40 minutes. We promptly informed our host of the delay. When we landed in Rome at 00:20, we received a text message from Rodrigo P. of Airbnb saying that we missed the „check-in window” and that the host cannot let us in the apartment that night (we paid five nights or c. 500 Euros in full beforehand). He also told us to find a place for that night, and that the host would let us in the apartment at noon the next day. We were stunned. Later Airbnb called us and said that they had tried to reach Maria Lucia, our host several times on the phone, which she did not answer.
By 1:00 a.m. we got out of the airport and, not unsurprisingly, we could not secure any room online for that night, so we asked a local taxi driver to take us to a place nearby, where we stayed for 96 Euros in a mediocre hotel.
The next day we arrived to the apartment at 12:00 noon sharp and waited for Maria Lucia, who showed up 20 minutes late. In mixed Italian and English, she said she was ’upset’ about what happened. We told her that it was us who could be upset after last night, when we arrived in a foreign city at 1 a.m., only to learn that we cannot use the apartment we had already paid for and that we should find us a place in the middle of the night. Maria Lucia was quite unfriendly and possibly rude with us (we speak no Italian, so we could not tell for sure but her body language sure signalled it).
I think that if somebody becomes a host on Airbnb, the least one can expect from them is that they should be available to let the guests in even if they arrive late due to flight delays. Or they should find a way to provide some way to check in (e.g. keypad-locked boxes for the keys) .
To Airbnb’s credit, they later agreed to pay the extra cost of our stay at another place the first night. And they sent us several text messages every day during our stay asking us how we were doing, which indicated that they kind of felt the shame. However, they could not give us back the wee hours and the full morning we lost out of four full days of vacation in Rome.
On a more positive note, the apartment is at a very good location, close to Saint Peter’s Square (one can see the dome of the cathedral from the balcony), coffee shops, restaurants and a Carrefour supermarket, and is adequately equipped.