Public NOTE about ANBN
My husband and I found this ABNB to be a great location. It is a cute place and the restaurants on the street are really good. However, that's about the extent of the positive reviews.
There were so many problems with this apartment. When the IKEA furniture was put together so many parts were not secured and put together correctly. So many fixtures all around the apartment were loosely and inaccurately put together… such as loose door handles, knobs falling off, missing knobs and hardware on sinks and drains. A missing screen on the sink resulting in water spraying everywhere any time we’d use the faucet, do dishes. No cleaning solutions and cleaning equipment (paper towels, hand soap, toilet paper) when we arrived other than a broom, a moldy mop and broken vacuum. Our first night, … we discovered hair all over the sheets.
The apartment was decluttered but had not truly been cleaned when we arrived. There was hair on the sheets, food leftover on the dishes and put away as such dust and filth on the countertops and on surfaces. Concealed filth that we had no means to clean it, urgently, before going to sleep the first night we were there…jet lagged and wanting to make our appointments the next day. We had to rush to the nearest grocery store before it closed that night to buy sanitizing sprays, dish soap, laundry detergent…all so that we could clean and sanitize the place before we went to sleep.
A smell coming from the bathroom drains that never went away for the entire stay and mysterious puddles would form along the floor near the bid-day and toilet. Initially we thought it was from bad caulking around the shower well but it did not connect.
Most inconvenient of all of this, is that something was wrong with the electrical as two thirds of the time you would run the laundry the fuse would blow for the entire apartment. We believe it was related to if the water heater was working at the time of the dryer but we’re unable to verify. This just resulted in unreliable ability to do laundry or leave the apartment unattended on busy days.
When we initially complained about the cleanliness and broken appliances. The communication resulted in wasting about three full days of our stay waiting for someone to show up, culminating in very little being repaired because of missing parts. This never got remedied for our entire month stay,
Additionally there where no attempts of communication from our host after the third day when we reported to Airbnb. In essence once the complaint was filed they had no reason to then work towards remedying our situation.
Communication was negligent and haphazard at best. Check in was totally weird…we waited outside the apartment building for 25 minutes before Ruben came out of the apartment to leave, as if we had stood him up. But this apartment is inside a building where the front door of the apartment building was secured by a lock and there where no details included in our check in instructions to know which apartment to contact. Innkeeper also did not respond to our ABNB messaging to tell us that someone was in the apartment (behind locked door) waiting for us to meet him there. Upon check-in with Ruben, my husband and I were told to use the a social media app outside of ABNB to communicate with our host, instead of using Airbnb’s chat feature which would keep ABNB in the loop. This caused problems getting ABNB support. Take my advise…don’t every let an ABNB host tell you to use something other than ABNB to communicate through.
The only effective method of communicating with this host was through another app outside of ABNB and that would take hours to a full day to respond. They also ghosted us until we got ABNB support involved. ABNB never confirmed that they had spoken with the host and therefore our issues with the smell, the electric, the laundry machine, the water leak in bathroom, the sink in kitchen…etc. were never resolved. My husband had a screwdriver and so had to secure all the loose and misfunctioning fixtures and we had to buy a screen for the sink and tape it around the faucet so to minimize having a soak at the most used sink in the place. I did experience ghosting and gaslighting from the Innskeeper hosts.
Problems with ABNB Support: We had learned, a few days into the stay, that Airbnb recommends that hosts and guest communicate any issues through the ABNB app, so that ABNB can monitor safety of the ABNBs). Wish we would have known this on day 1 because by day 3, when we worked to loop ABNB in on the various issues we were experiencing, ABNB Support made working to solve the problems 10x worse. ABNB support passed me on through 5 different support representatives, all of which, despite having written and submitted a word document, asked me to explain the problems to each of them, and having to correct misinterpretations over and over again. ABNB transferred me over to speak with English Speakers in an off-shore call center and their time zone was exactly opposite of mine and they were each unable to fully comprehend the situation. I don’t think ABNB Support cared that they were wasting my precious work and travel time and they certainly were never able to get the host to fix the problems. One representative even pursued our communications as if I were in panic and in an unsafe situation (I was not in danger)…but this representative did not act in anyway that would have been supportive or effective if I had been in a dangerous situation. It was very frustrating and I didn’t feel at all safe in the hands of ABNB support. I won’t be using ABNB again to book any lodging.
Final note after speaking with other locals