Regretfully, interactions with Cristina were not up to the standards usually expected of Airbnb hosts. Communicating with her was confusing because Cristina prefers to correspond via gmail/SMS (although she does not take any calls) and generally operate outside of the Airbnb infrastructure, for example in relation to additional payments (which she would request be made separately in cash).

There was also a rather bizarre series of SMSes in which she out of the blue insisted on meeting me on a certain afternoon during which I was very busy. Still not quite sure what this fuss was all about or why, if she genuinely wanted or needed to meet me for whatever reason, she couldn't have arranged this with me beforehand rather than suddenly on the day itself.

Finally, when we inadvertently left behind an item of clothing on the day of checkout and tried later to retrieve it, we found Cristina to be unfriendly and unhelpful in dealing with this. We planned to meet her at a stipulated time outside the apartment to collect the item and ended up waiting half an hour there to no avail. Cristina claims that her cleaning lady waited for us for 20 minutes before leaving; conveniently, Cristina says the lady left just before we texted (at 10-15 minutes) to enquire why no one was there to meet us as planned. Following this episode, she refused our suggestion that she just drop the item off at a hotel reception down the road from the apartment and insisted that we come back to the apartment in the evening to try again to pick it up. She ignored our further attempts to confirm this arrangement or arrange another time to pick up the item. We were frustrated to have wasted an entire afternoon on this (we eventually left Venice without having retrieved our belongings) and disappointed that our attempt to propose a reasonable alternative resolution was met with the indignant retort that "Airbnb is not a hotel". Granted Airbnb is not a hotel, but that should not mean that guests should not expect minimum standards of transparency, honesty and professionalism when interacting with Airbnb hosts.