Host forgot our booking, had to wait outside until 2 in the night.
Important: do NOT book this room if you don’t speak French. The host has written on her profile that she speaks Spanish but even though I contacted her in Spanish and said I don’t speak French she insisted on only replying back to me in French.
I booked this room and immediately informed her about my travel plans and what time I would arrive. It is a self-check-in apartment but when we were almost arriving we had still not received any information about how to enter the apartment. I sent her a message inside the app to which she did not respond. I then sent a normal text message and tried calling her from three different phone numbers, but still no sign from her at all. When around two hours had passed we decided to search for a hotel; it was already late and we needed somewhere to sleep. When we were almost about to pay for our hotel night, we saw that Chantal had written in the app that she had forgotten my booking and that I should call her again. Never did she apologize for the inconvenience, neither did she try to call me back. To add to it she only had a foreign number which I was then forced to pay for to call to. We called again, but she didn’t answer this time either. We tried several times and left messages but no response. I started wondering if this was in fact a scam. We decided we would stay at the hotel after all and when we were almost about to check in (for the second time) we finally got ahold of her in a last attempt to call. A French hotel receptionist kindly spoke on the phone with her as Chantal evidentially (judging from her previous messages) only spoke French. Instead of giving the instructions directly she started asking the receptionist a lot of questions both about the receptionist herself and about me and my co-traveler, questions that had nothing to do with the booking, such as our ages and nationalities. After a 13 min long phone call we had finally received some instructions, although extremely vague, and could drive to the apartment. As we entered the apartment we realized the electricity was turned off which she had never mentioned. It was now the middle of the night and pitch black inside as well as outside. After solving that we also had to figure out how to turn on the water, which she had mentioned but not at all exactly how it should be done. What made this situation even worse is that on the phone she started blaming us even though she had admitted she has forgotten the booking. This is by far the worst Airbnb experience I’ve ever had after using the service in three different countries and I do not recommend this host at all, especially not if you don’t speak French.