Let me start with the good things:
It has a nice view and the location is good if you like this general area. It also was what I would call a second living room in-between the bathroom and bedroom.
There’s also a desk which is nice with an office chair. The host is fairly responsive to a point which I’ll go into later.
Now for the bad side:
1. The Wifi: I’ve done multiple speed tests and the WiFi speed is normally at 1.5 Mbps. This is really slow and doesn’t even allow for simple things like a video call. Which I tried multiple times and had frequent dropped calls and buffering. Also, the WiFi only reached the end of the first living room but, to the owner’s credit, this part was resolved when the owner bought a booster during the stay.
When asked about how we could resolve the extremely slow wifi the owner’s response was that it’s an old building and that it can’t be installed. Later his response was that it’s not an office. I normally assume when there is a desk in the apartment that is geared for people who want to work somewhat. I had also asked the owner before my stay how the wifi was and he had responded that they had “areas in the flat to work” and the “upload and download speed were quite good.”
2. The A/C does not blow cold air. I saw one reviewer mention that the Airbnb stays quite warm which is great in the middle of the winter but not so great when it’s hot outside. The owner claims that it does but doesn’t. I tried multiple times trying to reprogram it and spent an hour pressing all the buttons with no luck.
This led to us sweating during our sleep and waking up and immediately having to take a shower. Leaving the windows open did not change this.
When the owner was told about this he did buy a fan and brought it the day after. This did help somewhat but we still woke up the next morning sweating (I’ll be it a little less)
3. It looks nicer in the pictures. The pictures are taken in a way to make the place look nicer than it is. There are holes in multiple places in the walls and the sockets for electricity are falling out of the walls. The bath also has multiple stains (covered up by the wood shelf in the photo.) My overall impression was that the apartment was put together in as cheap of a way as possible. For instance, one leg on the couch is held up by stacked books and a coffee stand that’s been nailed together.
My stay was booked for around 2 weeks. When I first moved in I immediately gave the owner the above issues and he did work to attempt to resolve them at the start. As I said, he did bring a wifi booster to increase the range as well as a fan. These did help but they didn’t resolve the issues.
After staying for three nights and releasing that these problems would not be resolved I reached out to the owner asking on Friday if we could move out the following Monday. My intention was to give the owner a few days to find another tenant. I also offered to pay for the above items even though he would be keeping them and using them for the apartment.
The owner’s response was basically he couldn’t change the reservation and that we could try to find solutions. When I asked how else can we resolve these issues the owner stopped responding.
The following day I reached out to support and showed them proof of the issues above. Seeing this they offered me to move out the next day with a slight rebate on the days. Since this was the only solution at this point I took the offer.
I messaged the owner that morning that I would be leaving at 11 am and asked where to drop the keys. The owner didn’t respond till later mid-afternoon saying to leave them in the apartment. I had left one key but not the other since the owner said he only had two sets and I assumed that he would be locked out if I had left them both in.
I did end up returning the keys a few days later when asked for them. As a relevant side note: The host unfortunately became uncordial after Airbnb approved the move and unfortunately I fed into it and gave it right back. I tried to provide all relevant info without dragging this on too long.x