We have been living in Airbnbs for the past months, while working and traveling around the world. Hence, we rely a lot on reviews from other travelers when choosing our next accommodation. This is the first Airbnb where we have had issues. I usually tend to ignore small details, but here is my 100% honest review (pros & cons):
Pros:
- Great central location, you will never get bored in the Galata area
- Wifi is okay, good enough for video calls, but rather slow for downloading reports, streaming etc (looks like that's the case all over Turkey)
- AC works perfectly fine, and you don't even need them at night most of the times since temperatures go down
- Apartment is spacious
- Nadira & Gokhan are quick to respond to all the questions
Cons (specially considering the high price!)
- Apartment is very run down, the furniture is classic style and beautiful, but it is very old and needs replacement or maintenance. A chair broke down while we tried to seat down and the other ones were about to break too. The door handles fell down multiple times as well as the top portion of the door's frame which even had a nail on it. The shower head was so rusty that looked dirty even though it was not the case. The shower door was broken and the water would leak while you shower, and many other small things that will not necessarily affect your comfort, but it's definitely NOT what you expect from a place where you pay so much money to stay.
- We had family come over and the sofa bed was VERY uncomfortable and dirty. On top of that, the extra sheets were stained and one of them had a huge hole. We reached out to Nadira and we had new sheets the next day, but this was unacceptable. Blaming it on the cleaning lady or the current pandemic situation does not help either, and makes it even more unprofessional.
- Something else to consider is that we had to pay a fee for the "cleaning lady" to come during our 3-week stay and it turns out, the co-host was the one cleaning the apartment. There is nothing wrong with him cleaning the apartment, but this is something our other hosts have made complememntary. Needless to to say this also made us feel even worse about the whole experience.
After all this, the host said she wanted to reimburse some of the fee, but they had already spent most of it and offered a future three-day stay for free instead. Overall, I would stay away from this property because you could get better value for your money. Istanbul is a great city and pretty inexpensive for western standards and you should not let an apartment like this negatively affect your experience. Hope you find this review useful!