I really hate giving a bad review and usually I avoid giving a review at all if I don’t have anything good to say but I feel obligated to do so in order to protect the safety of anyone else who decides to stay there.
I guess I’ll start from the beginning. Check in went smoothly. There was a lockbox with the key which made things easy. The apartment looked as expected from the pictures. It’s really not a bad apartment.
However the moment we walked in both my girlfriend and I were struck by an odor of mold and mildew. The apartment felt humid so I thought maybe it just needed to be aired out. I came back a few hours later and it really wasn’t any better so I sent a message to the host but it was evening at that point so I didn’t hear back until the next day.
We slept there that night but decided the next morning that we would not stay there another night as the smell literally gave both of us headaches.
The next day I was told by the host that they would ask the maintenance person if anything could be done. I waited several hours and asked again and received no response. Eventually I decided that it was not worth paying another night for an apartment with a smell of mold.
For some people this may not be as much of an issue and I understand that experiences with smells like this may vary. In all honesty at this point I thought the host may have had the best intentions and that the issue could have mostly been blamed on communication issues. However what proceeded after this is totally unacceptable.
When I left the apartment I mistakenly took the keys with me. I messaged Airbnb support letting them know that I had the keys and wished to return them.
Airbnb support spoke with the host who asked me to drop them off in the unit. Based on my memory it was the middle of the afternoon when this message was sent to me and I let them know that I would be able to drop the keys off later that day.
Later that day I returned to the apartment..opened the door..and I hear a frightened woman who clearly had know idea who I was. Based upon the open luggage I saw on the floor I can only conclude that the host put another guest in the apartment while I still had the keys and asked me to return the keys to the apartment while the guest was there.
This is what I find to be the most unacceptable part of the whole experience. She endangered me (by putting me in a situation where the other guest can only assume that I’m breaking into their apartment) and she endangered the other guest by putting them in the apartment while another guest had the keys. I would be absolutely furious if I was the other person and a stranger just walked into my apartment.
When this happened I dropped the keys in the apartment and left in a hurry. The host later message me asking where I left the keys because she couldn’t find them. I told them what had happened and received zero response so I can only assume that the host didn’t care in the least.
Again I really hate to think that someone is intentionally this bad at what they do and my first instinct is to always assume the best and that it had to have been a miscommunication of some form. However with all of these things together I really have a hard time doing that and I do actually fear for the safety of any guest who decides to stay there.