Unfortunately this will be the first less than favorable review I’ve ever written. In the past, if there were things amiss, I would privately let the owner know. But our overall stay was not great. The neighborhood is beautiful, and the apartment itself was extremely clean, beautiful and spacious.
One of the main reasons we get an AirBnB over a hotel is the ability to be able to cook. After we got settled, we started going through the kitchen so we could plan on going grocery shopping and planning out meals. In his listing, Hector lists as having cooking essentials such as oil, salt and pepper. Well, there was no oil, salt, pepper, sugar or anything at all for cooking. I’ve stayed in several AirBnB’s and have family/friends who are owners as well—and this was the first AirBnB were there was NOTHING to cook with. When I told family and friends who are owners, they were in disbelief how bare bones it was. Because our flight arrived in the evening, we went to the corner store to buy oil (to make breakfast), sugar, water, salt, pepper, coffee creamer and other general essentials that most AirBnB’s have. We decided to fry some eggs the following morning, but there wasn’t even a spatula to flip the eggs, so it was a bust. We let them know how the apartment didn’t even have salt, pepper, sugar, oil or a wine opener. The next morning, they brought a wine opener and bag of sugar. But not before telling us there was plenty of sugar. The sugar they had were the small packages of Stevia, which is not regular sugar. When we figured we weren’t going to be able to actually cook, we bought fruit, but guess what, no cutting board. We decided to order enough food at restaurants so we could have left overs to heat up, being that we couldn’t cook. But the dishes they have are all metal and cannot be put in the microwave. Another bust.
Our first night there, we couldn’t get the safe open, the remotes for the tv’s were left in random places of the house, couldn’t get 2 of the tv’s to work, and a couple of the lamps in the room were not working. The next day someone came, and he fixed the tv in the large bedroom. When he looked at the tv in the bedroom with the 2 twin beds, he said, “oh I see it’s disconnected.” He was messing with cords in the back and I thought he was fixing it, but later on that night when I went to turn the tv on, it was not working. I looked at the back of the tv, and the cords were all still disconnected. I didn’t even bother messaging them again, because it was more of a hassle, and it honestly felt like we were a bother to them.
The wifi in the large bedroom kept going in and out. In the small room with the 2 beds, the wifi didn’t work at all, and it didn’t work on the 3rd floor either. The only place it was solid was on the 1st floor. Unfortunately, I was working and had to connect to my hotspot and use up all of my data to be able to get any work done.
We also had issues with the keyless entry. The code was shared with us, but there weren’t specific instructions how to open it. When we would touch it, the area for the fingerprint would always open up and the keypad wouldn’t display so that we could enter the code. One of these mornings when we returned to the apartment to pick coats up, we couldn’t get in as the fingerprint button kept opening and wouldn’t allow us to enter the code. We ended up leaving and messaged them and they told us it will lock you out after a few attempts but would reset after 15 minutes. They offered to send someone out when we returned later that day, but we didn’t know what our schedule would be like, so we forgot to send the message when we were heading back. We got back in the evening and the lock still wasn’t working, so we messaged them and called Hector. I told him my name and how I had messaged earlier in the day when we couldn’t get the door open, and he tells me, “I have 30 apartments, I don’t know who you are, I need the address.” I asked him to look up his rentals as he is the owner, and sarcastically tells me, “I’m on the phone with you right now, I can’t look them up.” As If I’m not on the phone, and as if he couldn’t put me on speaker phone and look up our listing. He didn’t bother apologizing, but had me put him on speaker to look up the address of HIS 1 of his 30 listings…. It was such an impersonal thing to say and rude way to treat customers who are paying him.
The last thing to note, is even though the apartment has a very kind security guard who works at the front of building, the actual apartment isn’t very secure. We opened up the window near the dining table, and there was no lock on the window. Anyone could hop right in. Same goes for the patio on the 1st floor, the lock was broken.
While the apartment itself is nice, the listed amenities were not all accurate. This was the first AirBnB that we’ve had all these issues with. It defeated the purpose of staying here, and we would have been better off staying in a hotel. We stayed in a 2nd AirBnB not far from this one after we checked out and what a world of difference. The owner had clear instructions for the keyless lock, had salt, pepper, sugar, coffee, coffee creamer, garlic, olive oil, cutting boards, wine openers, lots