The apartment is unclean and unwholesome. The hosts behaved in an unscrupulous manner. Specifically, they kept our money and refused to allow us to re-enter the apartment to document for Airbnb the cleanliness, health, and safety issues that compelled us to vacate the apartment within one hour after checking in.
We are avid Airbnb users and have stayed in many, many accommodations over the years, large and small, expensive and inexpensive. We have never left a negative review for any host.
We do so in this dispiriting case to let otherAirbnb travelers to what to expect when dealing with this host, and what they will find to be to be the condition of the apartment.
Within minutes of checking in we concluded that the dirty and dusty floors, loose carpet, stained bedding area, scuffed and dirty walls, and pervasive unhealthy smell made it impossible for us to stay. We let our host know of our decision and phoned airbnb to report the conditions in the apartment. Etsh then arrived at the apartment while we were on the phone speaking to an airbnb representative. My husband listed for him the issues we observed that made the accommodation fall short of the health and safety standards that airbnb hosts were obligated to ensure.
Etsh disagreed with two of our characterizations--he claimed not to notice the pervasive smell, and put his hand in an dent in the wall to make the point it was not in fact a "hole," as we had characterized it. Nevertheless our interaction was amicable and brief, and we understood him to agree to our request that he cancel the reservation and refund our money. We left the key on the table at his request and went in search of a hotel where we could stay for the duration of our three-day London vacation.
Soon after our departure we heard from airbnb that Etsh had refused our request for a refund. Airbnb also let us know that in order to make a judgment on our claim we would need to document with photographs the issues of sanitation, health, and safety that compelled us to leave.
Having left the key behind at Etsh's instruction, we had no way of re-entering the apartment to take pictures. We wrote to him to repeat our request for a refund and to indicate our desire to return to document the uncleanliness and other issues that had caused us to leave. Rather than respond, the host let the clock run out on our communication. After we had left London we received word that the host had again refused our request for a refund.
In sum, we paid the host over $700 for an unwholesome accommodation we occupied for less than an hour, and to which his actions kept us from returning to document the issues of cleanliness, health, and safety that made it uninhabitable.