PLEASE READ ALL OF THIS BEFORE BOOKING:
I couldn’t be any more disappointed or disgusted by this property and by the host.
For a place that charges a £50 cleaning fee the whole place was disgusting when we arrived. As soon as I opened the door the smell of smoking hit all of us, something that supposedly is not allowed in the property to begin with. Various walls around the apartment were dirty and had different types of stains on them, the oven looked like it had never been cleaned as it was full of grease and food. The glasses and mugs were not usable as they were filthy and grimy. The tin of teabags had a used wet teabag inside of it. The utensils as well as the container they were in were greasy and grimy and therefore not usable. The glass table and the countertops hadn’t been wiped in who knows how long. The rugs in the living room needed to be hoovered and were filthy and stunk, there were wrappers behind the TV, and both the sofa and lounge chair stunk of smoke. The lounge chair also was heavily stained. We didn't even want to sit on them because of how filthy, stained, and disgusting they were. There was a blanket on the sofa as well which stunk and wasn't usable at all. One of the rooms had a small closet in it, and when I opened it the smell of dampness was overbearing. It was disgusting. This room also had mould on two different walls by the window, and the doors, set of drawers, and bedsides tables, all had black stains at the bottom of them which along with the raised carpets in this room made it seem like as if there had been a flood or something. The bathroom also was not fully clean, you could see the grime in different corners, and the towels didn't smell good either. Lastly, the hallway outside of the apartment was clearly used a peeing spot for people and it was clear from the stains on the wall. There was no effort made by the hosts to try and make the entrance welcoming at all. The pictures put on this listing made this stay seem lovely and clean. Unfortunately, it was disgusting and unusable.
The way we checked into this apartment was using a key in a locked safe outside the apartment complex. This singular key unlocked the outside gate, the gate into the building, AND our apartment. This didn't make us feel safe at all knowing that anyone with the key into the building could get into our apartment. When we called the host to ask about this they said that it didn't make sense and we should have two keys, and they refused to believe that we only had one key.
I messaged the host about my concerns and after forty minutes of waiting for an answer I decided to call them. I first talked to a Eva, who asked me to send her all of the pictures I had taken, and after seeing them she assured me that we would get our money back for everything minus the night we stayed there, but that she would talk to her manager to see if we could get that money back. Eva was helpful and apologized for the state of the place. We had booked the place for two nights, but we decided that because of the awful conditions it was in that we wouldn’t be staying at all. The only reason we stayed there the first night was because we had nowhere else to go. We had to sleep in these damp smelling rooms and beds. The next morning after we had left the place, since I hadn't heard anything else from anyone I decided to call again and this time I talked with Charlotte. Charlotte was as dismissive as she was unhelpful. Even though she understood our complains she said there was nothing she could do since we were deciding to leave. The only option they gave us was to send a cleaner that day to clean the place, but it was clear from the state of the place that a cleaner wouldn't be able to make it acceptable or look anywhere like the original pictures of the listing showed. Also, we shouldn’t have to take time out of our days to have someone clean a place that is supposed to be already professionally cleaned. When I confronted her about the mould, all she said was that unfortunately we had gotten there before the monthly inspection and that was maybe why it was like that. It doesn't make sense at all for a host to charge a cleaning fee if they're not going to actually clean their properties, and they should always be checked before a new booking shows up, not monthly.
I would have been happy having paid what I paid for this listing if the state of the apartment was the same one that was described and showed in the original pictures. However, the whole stay was disgusting, and it felt unsafe.
I highly suggest against booking this place. The host isn’t a singular host but a group of people, which doesn’t help as one person can say one thing and the next person that you talk to would tell you something else. They were very unhelpful and rude and insisted on not returning me any of the money for the nights that I did or didn’t stay. The only thing they returned was the cleaning fee, and frankly that’s not enough. During these times of coronavirus it is imperative that things are cleaned more than thoroughly and instead the host made it seem like it was our fault for wanting to leave a property where we didn't feel safe and that was unhabitable. It's a disgrace for this conglomerate of people to lie to the public and not genuinely help them with their