Our booking of our 6 night stay got confirmed by AirBnB and we were so looking forward to this great villa and wrote a message to Matteo how to check-in.
Just one day before our planned arrival, instead of a warm welcome, Matteo wrote an one sentence message (!) that the venue is occupied and we could only arrive two days later than what we had booked.
OUCH!
He didn't show any support in helping us to solve this challenge and was barely responsive as we had no way to call him and didn't put any effort into messaging properly with us.
The "AirBnB free cancellation time" for me was already over as he just warned us one day ahead and he didn't cancel our booking from his side, though I asked him to. He just didn't reply back to my last messages for more than a week though having received our money already.
I asked support to get us our money back, which happened eventually but still no sign of life from Matteo until today.
The villa looks beautiful on pictures and we would have loved to stay there, but our experience with the host is just terrible, as he neither seems to be in control of the correct calendar booking dates for his venues nor does he offer any service or communication in a bad case like this. Also just answers in Italian, so is either too lazy or not able to communicate in english, though his profile says he does.
My by far worst AirBnB host experience I've had in almost 8 years on the platform.
On the plus side (having nothing to do with this bad host) we were lucky to spontaneously find a new and gorgeous accomodation with just one afternoon left before moving places. We would have loved to invest these hours into exploring monopoli instead of stressfully searching for alternatives.
Also the trouble involved afterwards to get our money back by explaining the whole situation to the AirBnB support as Matteo didn't respond was very unnecessary.