The pictures don’t lie; when you step off the street into Sam’s apartment you are greeted by a peaceful, tidy space made all the more relaxing by the array of hanging plants. The bedrooms are comfortable, the property is cosy, and it’s in a great location to reach central London within half an hour.
Unfortunately, our experience became less peaceful and relaxing upon our departure. In the days after our stay, Sam reported to us that the bathroom mirror had been broken, and the second set of keys for the apartment had gone missing. Supposedly these issues had occurred during our stay and been reported by the cleaner.
We had left the apartment in the exact state in which we found it; there was no broken mirror. We had never been informed there was a second set of keys inside the apartment and had only retrieved the single set from the lockbox outside.
Sam informed us that he had a set of keys cut to replace the 2nd set. As they had “gone missing” during our stay we were sent a payment request for, wait for it... £80! This is a ridiculous sum of money, even if we had lost the keys.
We spent a couple of days messaging back and forth reiterating we had never even seen the keys and would not be paying the £80. We also stated that we knew nothing about the mirror. We had left during Storm Ciara, and noticed that the extractor fan in the bathroom had been blowing and knocking all night. As the bathroom mirror was only resting precariously on the windowsill, it is likely that it was blown off. Or the cleaner broke it and blamed us. But hopefully not.
5 days after our stay, Sam sent a final message that the missing set of keys had, in fact, been found in the apartment. This was so frustrating because the accusations and wasted time were pointless. The whole process could have been avoided if the keys had been properly searched for in the first place, rather than immediately blaming your paying guests! I can understand that you would want to recoup your losses if a guest had caused an issue, but you need to be absolutely sure they did it first.