After thinking about it for a while, we decided to write an honest review and to not just forget about it and move on.
The Poet’s house is quite an impressive ancient house. However it’s just not maintained well enough to make for a truly comfortable stay. It’s certainly not up to Airbnb Plus standards. Even if you consider that it’s an old house and as such might be a bit more rustic, there’s still quite a lot of issues we had during our stay that cannot be excused by that.
Following the description on Airbnb we were expecting a calm and serene environment. However it is situated quite close to one of the main streets connecting Ragusa and the coast and especially on weekends the traffic is noisy until late into the night.
The house is decorated nicely enough and you’ll find most of the everyday equipment that you need.
However, we had countless issues with the bathrooms: low water pressure in the shower, long time to get warm water running, shower heads fixture broken, towel holder breaking away from the wall, bath tub leaky with water running on the floor, leaking toilet, grubby shower curtain, grubby hair dryer and an overall unpleasant smell in the bathrooms (probably from the sewage). Amalia got a plumber to fix the leaking bath tub within a day. However we wonder why that had not been detected before our arrival.
In the kid’s bedroom the wardrobe door turned out to be badly broken: our little daughter tried to open it and the massive mirrored door fell down on the floor. Our daughter managed to jump to the side and luckily did not get injured.
There were flies and mosquitoes everywhere and it was a real nuisance. We didn’t even use the outdoor space because of that. We bought special candles to get rid of them which worked partially, but only indoors. Our kids had lots of painful bites after just one night in their beds, even after we sprayed them with insect repellant. Even now, more than two weeks later, these bites have not fully healed.
The kitchen is quite well equipped, however there is no proper oven, only a microwave with an additional grill feature. Even to warm up pizza was not possible, let alone prepare an oven dish for dinner.
Regarding the quality of service provided: Amalia tried to fix the worst issues (e. g. the leaky bath tub) and gave us a bike and scooter for the kids as well as sun beds and a parasol for the beach, which was nice. But in the end that was not enough to make up for the issues. Apart from the wardrobe door, each of these issues alone might have been acceptable but in combination – and especially as an Airbnb Plus location – it left us with an unsatisfactory experience.