My family and I arrived in the Spanish Steps section of Rome where we have stayed before after a long flight with layover to find our apartment door locked and no host to be found. We had scheduled and updated Sebastian as to our arrival time, yet there we stood for over an hour in 90+ degree Fahrenheit on the street with three children and adults all exhausted after our long flight. After many failed attempts to call and text Sebastian we finally made contact and he said he was sorry about being late but would be over in 15 minutes. That time passed and we received word he was stuck in traffic, finally a gentleman arrived who said he worked for Sebastian and again with apologies said he would let us in and show us around, at that time he also indicated that Sebastian felt so bad about being late he would pay for our return cab fare to the airport, nice gesture but we were not scheduled to leave Italy only after four nights so we asked if this could be applied to the 70 euro tax we had to pay him cash that we never knew about but that was not possible, still waiting for that money. The three bedroom apartment was clean and the towels and accessories were well placed on the beds, the air conditioning although off when we arrived worked well once it got going, we were then informed that the dish washer and washing machine were both broken (this was blamed on the last guests, we were there from July 5, 2019 thru July 9, 2019, so you last group you know who you are, to concur or deny these claims). During the tour of the unit someone opened the facet in the main bathroom and the floor flooded, this turned out to be the drain pipe disconnected from the facet which the gentleman tightened by hand and said he would be back to make sure this was tightened properly. Next we tried to use the master bath shower which is a hand held unit that normally attaches to the pipe riser so it can be used as a conventional shower to find the shower head draped with its flex hose around the pipe, you could only use it by holding it over your head not to convenient unless you are ambidextrous and very flexible, LOL. On Saturday July 6, I texted Sebastian to find out the status of the repairs on the appliances and shower and heard nothing, on Sunday I was told no one was available but that men would arrive on Monday to fix the problems. Since we were leaving Tuesday morning this really did nothing for us and since apparently everyone knew about these problems prior to our arrival on Friday you would figure that the repairs would have been made then, since we couldn’t get into the place anyway (see above). Unfortunately, Sebastian never again called us to apologize, never arranged to meet us to try to make things right and his hollow offer of possibly paying for our return ride to the airport was just that. To be honest a true professional would have returned at least one (1) nights lodgings since the unit was costing us over $500.00 per night, not exactly Motel 6 pricing.
I have rented thru AirBnB before and had a great experience, wrote an honest and very positive review that was well deserved and I will certainly continue to use AirBnB’s going forward, am actually using one later in my trip but i believe this to be an honest review and await Sebastian’s response.