One of the main reasons that we booked this apartment was the comments made by previous guests as to the helpfulness of Elena in making their visit pleasant. She did meet us at the vaporetto dock as promised and led us to the apartment. That, however, seemed to be the limit of the assistance that we received. This may have been as a result of our lack of Italian or just our own expectations. We also have rentals and are extremely highly rated on several websites, to a great extent because of our willingness to do anything necessary to assure a PERFECT visit. Our experience fell short of this. The cleaning fee would of course been justified had the apartment been clean. The floor, although swept was dirty and there was mold in the shower. Thinking that due to being right next to a canal is was inevitable, we scrubbed part of it and found that with about an hours effort it could have been clean.
This is not to say that the apartment was without its charm. If you have ever lived on a wooden sailboat, this experiece would be highly reminicent with about 8 cm of clearance from the wooden beams to my husband's head and a bathroom about the size of a boat "head" along with the boats going by about a meter from the window. With a few caveats, I could reccommend it.