Host Fernando is a very nice man…and his flat is a horror story. It has exactly one thing going for it. It’s well situated, around 30 seconds from the Ayora Metro station, and around 20 minutes to the beach.
Even on the sunniest day, it evokes the Four Tops’ song Seven Rooms of Gloom. It smells strongly of mould. The shower may be the worst in western Europe — a feeble trickle. And it isn’t unusual for the drain to be overwhelmed before the feeble trickle heats up. Hello, flooded bathroom floor! There is no hot water in the bathroom sink, so, if you want to wash your hands properly after using the toilet, you’ll need to go into the kitchen. Several of the provided towels look as though they were used some years ago, when they were actually white, to clean up industrial accidents.
We visited in the winter months, and very nearly perished of hypothermia. The heaters Fernando had provided raised the temperature within 10mm of the heaters by around one degree Celsius. He assured us that the air conditioner on the wall of the living room was more than sufficient to heat the whole house. It most assuredly was not. Set to the highest desired temperature, it awarded us a puff of air — cold air! — every hour or so. When we complained about this, Fernando assured us that he’d been perfectly comfortable when he’d occupied the flat, and that if our experience was different, we could always rent somewhere else!
No expense has been left unspared. Want to butter a piece of bread? Guess again. The flat offers only steak knives.
The living room furniture, including an unignorably stained sofa and a great, great many plastic chairs, is supremely uncomfortable. The pink recliner you’ll find in the flat was left out on Carrer de la Industria one misty morning in late December 2021, and added, by us, to the flat after determining that it wasn’t filthy, and was far more comfortable than any of the seating Fernando had provided.
One one occasion, the washing machine, fed up with seeing the shower and the heating system having such fun tormenting us, decided to get in on the action, and refused to open. We wound up washing the same load of clothes five times before it finally relented and allowed us to remove our much-washed laundry.
Ninety-five percent of previous occupants describe Fernande as reliable? At one point in our stay, it took him five days to produce the additional space heater we’d said we simply couldn’t do without.
Have we mentioned that if you run one of the little space heaters, the washing machine, and the implacably capricious oven (a horror story in its own right!) simultaneously, you’re almost sure to trip the circuit breaker, and lose all power in the flat. Make sure your smart phone has a flashlight app!
Again, it gives me no pleasure to say any of this, but Fernando’s flat is by far the worst AirBnB accommodation of any price I’ve yet stayed in.