PLEASE DON’T STAY HERE — NIGHTMARE HOSTING
This was by far my worst Airbnb stay in nearly 10 years of using the platform.
My elderly mother and I stayed at Irene and Maria’s property for 4 nights in January. We were excited to stay at the House of Colors and spend our last days together for at least a year. We told the hosts that my mother is very sensitive to cold and Maria assured us the property would be ‘toasty warm in 30 minutes’. My mother has osteoporosis, which makes her joints painful in the cold.
The thermostat read 14°C when we arrived, and took 4 days to reach room temperature. My mother suffered terrible pain due to her osteoporosis and the cold. This would not have happened if the hosts had simply turned on the heating in good time before our January arrival.
On the first evening, Maria tried to take 90€ from us, after we called an emergency technician for a defective lock mechanism at the property’s entrance. Over the phone, Maria first told me the superintendent of the condominium would pay for the technician. That’s reasonable. However, about 20 minutes later in the phone conversation, Maria began gaslighting me (a powerful method of psychological abuse, where the abuser says the opposite of reality to make the victim doubt her perceptions are real). Suddenly, Maria turned around 180° and insisted my mother and I had agreed to pay 90€ for the building maintenance issue *from the beginning of the conversation*!
Our nightmare got worse from there. On the first night, a few hours after we refused to let them take 90€ from us for no reason, Maria and Irene tried to evict us from the property. My mother and I were polite, calm, and quiet throughout our stay, and the cruelty and lack of ethics in our hosts’ sudden attempt to kick us out shocked us. The hosts knew of my mother’s heavy bags (the building has no elevator). So we got help from Airbnb’s customer service. They judged we could stay, having broken no house rules or Airbnb regulations.
Unfortunately, this was not the end of the hosts’ abusive and discriminatory behaviour towards us.
Maria and Irene violated Airbnb’s nondiscrimination policy with their treatment of my mother, who is elderly and has a disability. The hosts’ abusive and threatening messages and phone calls on WhatsApp and the Airbnb app only ended late on the last night of our stay. Both hosts seemed to implicitly threaten to break items in their property after we left, presumably to squeeze more money out of us. Irene wrote to me on WhatsApp that she ‘will charge any cost needed to repair’ their broken property… when we’d broken nothing.
Thankfully, the Airbnb support staff were amazing. They helped us survive this nightmare. I believe the abusive messages and threats from Maria and Irene stopped on the last evening when Airbnb intervened.
I warn all guests: PLEASE DON’T STAY HERE. It looks nice in the photos, but in reality the property is falling apart and smells strongly of dirty socks. It’s bitterly cold in the winter. I don’t want you to go through the kinds of suffering and abuse my mother and I endured at the hands of Maria and Irene. The stress Maria and Irene created, for no reason, ruined our holiday in Rome, which was my last chance to see my elderly mother for at least a year.
Our stay at the House of Colors, and particularly our hosts’ treatment of us, created bad memories to last a lifetime.
There are so many great hosts and properties in Rome that there’s no reason to stay in this nightmarish place.