This was easily our best AirBnb experience yet, and it beat out all our other experiences by a healthy margin. And thanks to the concierge service that is included in the rental, Casai sits smack in the center of the intersection between a really good hotel and a really, really good AirBnb rental. In our opinion, this was the Apple of AirBnb rentals, and I would wholeheartedly, without reservation, recommend this property to anyone visiting Mexico City. If and when AirBnb expands into purchasing, running and listing their own properties, it wouldn’t surprise me for a second if Casai were to become one of their early acquisitions.
We were a party of three who rented the place for 15 days during the beginning of the Delta variant’s spread (July 2021). We expected that we’d need a place that was comfortable as we’d be spending most of our time staying put in the apartment. And it delivered pretty much on all fronts.
The apartment far exceeded the pictures which is saying something because these are some pretty darn good pictures. It’s a gorgeous place that feels brand new: a great layout with incredible ventilation and light. The finishes are just right: clean lines, minimal without trying too hard to be minimal. It was easy to be together as a family, and easy to get some privacy from each other. The living room/kitchen/dining room has a lovely open layout flanked by a wall of windows, and a nice little desk where you can sit and work while still participating in the family.
The location, Polanco, was excellent: far enough away from the bustle, but close enough to walk to it. It certainly lived up to its Wikipedia reviews as the Beverly Hills of South America: if shopping and high-end brands are your thing (it isn’t ours), this is the place to be. The big feature that we loved about the neighborhood is the walking path that cuts all the way through Polanco—we enjoyed walking everyday and marveling at all the off-leash dogs who were so well-behaved (a far cry from our dogs here in America). It’s worth mentioning that the apartment is about a 1-min walk to Superama, one of the bigger supermarket franchises in Mexico, and it’s hard to overstate how convenient that was if you’re doing a medium to longer-term rental with plans of cooking the majority of the time.
The amenities lived up to the reviews from other reviewers. The internet speed, for instance, is advertised as 100Mbps up/down. We were easily getting speeds over 200 Mbps consistently. My wife is an options trader—she traded through our stay, and the internet connection kept around 30 ThinkOrSwim charts functioning at very low latency the entire time. We’re both in tech, and I was making heavy use of the internet for my own job at the same time. And my mom is a social media and streaming addict who was constantly streaming her favorite shows on YouTube and Netflix. We’re used to a gigabit connection in our own home in Seattle, and the transition to this Casai property’s internet was seamless.
As if all of this weren’t enough, Casai throws in a 24-hour concierge service that was unlike anything we’d every experienced. If you’re someone who prefers texting to calling, their service will blow your mind. You just send them a message through the AirBnb app, and they tend to respond in a few minutes at pretty much any hour of the day. And they go seriously out of their way to try to meet any of your needs, and answer all your questions: everything from “Can you give me a recommendation for a good vegetarian restaurant?” to “Please find me the cheapest PCR test in our neighborhood” (we asked them for help with both of these, and they delivered quickly on both). To give you just a simple example: when we arrived, the key code for our door didn’t work. Tired from the day of flying, we groaned and thought, “Uh oh,” because we cynically expected that this would take a long time to resolve. I messaged Rosalia (our host) through the AirBnb app that our code wasn’t working. About 5 minutes later, someone showed up holding an open laptop in their hand, used google translate to tell us he was from Casai and was there to resolve our issue, and about a minute later we were in. He then spent 45 minutes without our involvement outside our door resolving the issue. I could write an entire 5-star review just about their concierge service full of examples like this. Suffice to say, it raises the bar on an already high bar that they’ve set through their property.
The only constructive feedback I had for this property is that the kitchen isn’t fully stacked for a 2-week stay if you’re planning to cook. Their concierge service filled most of the gaps for us—they even hooked us up with a blender—but there were a few essentials (strainer, peeler, big wok, containers to store leftovers, baking dish, etc.) that were missing. You can work around most of it by buying the items at Superama or IKEA.
All that said, this property gets 11 out of 10 stars from us. Sure, there were small issues here and there, but that’s just life. But the fact that our host(s) worked openly and tirelessly to fill even those small gaps is what took something that would have otherwise been close to a perfect stay, to better than perfect.