As we checked in to Vania’s place, two things stood out to us. Firstly, the host had advertised the home as having a garage. As we are driving a rental car, this feature and the laundry services drew our attention and attracted us to this place. The garage was extremely tight, was not capable of fitting our Fiat rental inside, so we were forced to park on the street. Secondly, as we tried to do our laundry, we couldn’t find any detergent. She told us the last guest must have finished it, but didn’t offer to replenish it. By the way, there’s also no cooking oil in the kitchen.
After the check in, all seemed ok until we lost electricity to the entire home on our fourth day. This was our last day and we had planned on doing our laundry as we continued on our extended trip here in Portugal.
When the power went out, we immediately contacted our host and she stated there was nothing she could do and said it was not her fault. Without electricity we could not do laundry, run the air conditioning, charge our phone and devices or even have access to internet. After several hours, we contacted her and simply asked for a partial refund of our 4 day stay. She told us it was not up to her but was up to Airbnb. We wrote to Airbnb and they informed us the host had refused our request stating it was “unreasonable”. Airbnb was very responsive and reached out to us by email and phone on multiple occasions. In fact, after the host refused to offer us our suggested partial refund, Airbnb made up the difference and refunded to us one nights stay value of our four day, which is all that we asked for. After the power returned on our last night, within a couple hours, it went off again. We contacted our host and she flatly said there’s nothing she could do. Obviously this property has unreliable power supply. Anyone considering staying here would be well advised about this. This experience was terrible.