I've stayed at a lot of Airbnb properties in the past, and this will stand-out as one of the worse experiences I've had on the platform.
I had booked this with a group of friends so we could attend a friend's wedding in Rome, but for the first 2 days we did not have hot water. This meant that 12 people - including 2 pregnant women - had to take cold showers in order to prepare for the wedding festivities. On the first night when I raised this to the host she said that all we had to do was turn the boiler on and off. We did the once, and after waiting for 30 minutes were able to get enough hot water for 2 showers. After that, we’d have to start the process again, which made it not sustainable and not everyone could have hot showers before the events started.
The next day the host did arrange for someone to come and fix the boiler. I had 2 people in the house at the time that the maintenance man came, but they did not hear the doorbell. From the moment the host called me to when the maintenance man left there was THREE minutes - which is a very short amount of time for you to expect someone on vacation to answer the call. She then called me again to try to arrange for him to come, but in the seven minutes that I was not on my phone it was decided that he wasn’t going that day.
The host did manage to get the man to come again the next day, but at this point we had been without hot water for 2 out of our 3 days stay. When I asked the host if she’d give us a discount because of the inconvenience, she said no, that I was ‘not a very nice person’ and that I was lying when I said that the shower would take 30 minutes to heat up just because I hadn’t raised that to her (it didn’t seem necessary when it was clear that the boiler was broken and needed to be repaired).
This was all in addition to a few other things that were problematic about the listing:
- The host’s communication was terrible. From the months leading up to the stay where I’d ask simple questions and she would outright not reply to them, to the more serious issue of not having any check-in instructions up to 30 minutes before our check-in (and after me having asked multiple times and following up on it). The phone number she has on the listing is not the correct one, so she does not pick up or answer text messages to that. I only found out the correct one when she finally called me to set the maintenance.
- Not all pillows had pillow cases, which is very unhygienic
- There was no soap in the bathrooms, even though this was advertised. There were soap containers by the sink, but they had not been filled in.
Not once did the host apologise for any of this.