A beautiful, practical and central appartment.
Overall we had a great time at this residence, but unfortunate events does drag this experience through the mud.
If you are looking to book a stay here you should read this.
Firstly we come in contact with Casa Cosi on Air-bnb who directs us to a woman whose name is Silva. We are forced to have all contact through Whats-App and not Air-bnb which is in it of itself anti-tenant. This forces us out on thinner ice then if all contact was made on Air-bnb. This is something we accept though, and we take a risk, but its good to be aware of this if you are looking to stay here and something shitty happens.
I got a text on Whats-App where our contact explains that there is someone who needs to enter our apartment with an insurance company regarding water filtration. I accept this and explicitly tell our contact at Whats-App to give us a heads up before they are here and tell us before they arrive so we can be there because of the rational safety concerns of someone whom we have not met are entering a place where we have all our valuables.
What happens the following day is that we hear someone knocking on the door at around 1 pm or there of. The people at the door is a guy called Owen from Casa Cosi and he is with the insurance company. He tells us we should have gotten a message notifying us of their arrival, we did not receive any word about them arriving. We were there by pure chance, and they would have entered without us even knowing if we wasn't there. This was really shitty considering i asked explicitly about getting word before their arrival so we knew when to expect them. But this is really nothing compared to the next "event"
The unfortunate event entailed involved the apartments electrical system and our hosts irrefutable actions, or lack thereof, towards acknowledging our safety concerns regarding it.
We had lunch on the second to last day and sensed something burned, we were checking everywhere then the power went in the entire apartment. We immediately started looking for the source, and found the electrical cabinet being the source. I reached out to our contact on Whats-App who advised us to flip the various switches in the cabinet, in order to restore power, but to no avail. She then sent me over on Whats-App to Owen who tried his best to help us over phone, but the problem was not easily fixable (the whole residual current device was toast). He then offered to come over, which at this point we had been out power for nearly three hours in the middle of the day. Owen tried his best at fixing the problem, but quickly realising that this was a no go and that the residual current device was burnt.
We had to get a electrician to fix this. The electrician was set to fix this at 17, 45 pm while power went around 13:30 pm, so we figure that we should go out in Barcelona while we wait. At 18:45 the problem was "fixed" according to Owen.
We have a gander at the circuit in the circuit cabinet and we all conclude with this looking way to shoddy for us to be able to confidently sleeping here without fearing for a fire starting. The wiring had exposed copper, and transferred heat. There was also sawdust on the burnt residual circuit breaker which could potentially catch fire.
We had to move out prematurely because we have lives to live and things to see. We won't risk our lives because we get told its "fixed". I contact our host (Silvia) and tell her kindly about our concerns and would like to have here take a look at the circuit with her own eyes and talk to us in person. She then tells us how the circuit is totally fine and it should be good to last long enough for tommorow, she does not acknowledge us wanting us to talk to her in person.
I tell her that we are going to check out early and wish her a good night.
This event ruined our last couple of days, as we had plans to do other things, but also not wanting to meet us really soured the otherwise overall good experience of the airbnb itself.
- Haavard