The three positives are the location (very convenient, close to the 100am shopping centre and Tanjong Pagar MRT), the washer/dryer, and the room size. However, this was one of my not so enjoyable air bnb experiences. The host and caretaker don’t seem to care much.
Messages I sent after booking were completely ignored. Only a few days before check in someone bothered to communicate with me.
Check in was ok, the caretaker checked me in. Some essentials, like the switches for warm water and the washing machine weren’t pointed out though. The room was spacious, but quite dirty. For instance, the previous guest’s food scraps were still in the sink and behind the door there was a big pile of dirt. “Housekeeping” (twice a week) meant throwing out rubbish and making the bed. No new sheets, no new towels, the dirt remained where it was on check in. Obviously “cleaning” the room happens with the door open.
The “window” has no glass, just iron bars and heavy wooden shutters. The shutters have to be closed as otherwise heat, humidity and mosquitoes would get in. So, effectively, no window, no natural light.
Worst of all, however, was the noise with an echoey hallway and a very thin door. Noise was mainly from “someone” talking loudly and shouting, often angrily on the phone with the speakerphone on, often accompanied by an “evil laughter”, nearly every night until after 1:00 am.
The bathroom’s drain was all but blocked, so the floor floods, and stays wet all the time. I cleaned the drain myself of the hairs and dirt of countless previous guests. Because of a design error of the bathroom floor (no fall towards the drain) the problem was not fixed, only slightly improved.
The water pressure of the sink in bathroom is extremely low. The caretaker tried to fix it, couldn’t, then simply advised that “it’s normal”. The stream was just a little bit more than trickling, so certainly not normal.
The aircon is centrally controlled, with the room being way too cold. It was not possible to change anything with the remote (response from the unit was three fast beeps which means “under centralised control”). When asking the caretaker about it he suggested new batteries (although that obviously wasn’t the problem), then asked if I wanted the unit switched off. My response was “no, but I want to be able to control the air con”. He said he’ll look at it later and I never heard back. Later that day it was however possible to change the temperature and fan speed, but it is not possible to switch the air con off. Even removing the key card did not switch off the air con.
The washing machine, however, shuts off when the key card is removed. With a 4 1/2 hour wash and dry cycle that is quite unreasonable.