We stayed for 3 nights in the apartment of Rosario and we left with very mixed feelings.
Let’s start with the good stuff. The apartment is well located in a quiet, cosy, almost pirate-style street close to restaurants, public transport, shops and places of interest. It was very clean, the AC worked and it was newly renovated. We never met anybody, but with the instructions on the app the checkin was easy and the elevator was helpful, since we had some heavy luggage. The bathroom was spacious and very clean. There is a washing machine, if you need it.
But the bed was one of the worst I slept in for a long time. Just a thin foam mattress and the bed nearly fell apart, because some screws had been missing. The kitchen and the fridge are directly next to the bed, so the fridge was waking us up when it jumped on in the middle of the night.
What really angered me, is that this is not a „private“ apartment, that gets rented out for the occasional visitor, but almost the whole house is turned into an apart-hotel. This is reflected in the IKEA-style of-the-shelf furniture and the bunch of key-safes in the entrance. When you talk to the locals, they will tell you that this transformation of normal living spaces into for-profit tourist accommodations is the main problem they face. The high rents and lack of affordable accommodations caused by that are the cause more and more people can’t afford anymore to live in the city. I know that this is a global phenomena and that I am (by using this platform) part of the reason for this, but I try to rent real apartments from real people for my travels and don’t like to be tricked into staying in a sterile tourist accommodation, that is intransparently marketed as „Rosarios Home“. I would definitely not stay there again.