No. Just no. As a single woman I felt extraordinarily unsafe in this house around this host. I had to move out early and find emergency accommodation elsewhere. It cost me a lot of money time energy and major stress. This host should not be renting her home to others. She seemed extremely anxious and nervous the whole time and had immense difficulty communicating what she wanted with me. She was messaging me or approaching me multiple times per day, adding on to, and changing her house rules well into my stay. I travel a lot. I have never experienced anyone this invasive or inappropriate as a host.
Where to begin. - I arrived and the door to my bedroom didn’t close. she didn't even tell me about it, I had to ask her about it. Door was fixed almost a week later. And notice I didn’t say the door didn’t lock, it didn’t CLOSE. Weird for a host with an actual padlock on the outside of her bedroom door.
- She didn’t have a key to the flat for me. I had to text her when she was back to make sure I could get in. she got me the keys the next day.
- Total false advertising: “lovely quiet room with city view” The room was not quiet, including the host banging pots and pans for a long time and went after 1 am on one of my first nights. The place wasn’t what I would call quiet. The view was the buildings of the street in the back!! Before booking, she neglected to tell me that she had her family staying the next day, including a newborn baby and her grown son in his 30s I’m guessing , who was walking around the kitchen in his [tighty whitey] underwear.
A few days into the stay, at night I put (my own) icecube tray of water into the freezer. I got up late the next morning to find the water was not frozen. (during a heat wave, she didn’t have a fan, and the room was very hot, I actually had to buy my own fan, and these were my ice cube trays). Seeing some space at the bottom of her freezer, I tried to open the freezer drawer to put the ice cubes in. Using minimal force when I tried to open it, the drawer instantly broke and sliced my pointer finger in several places, causing me to bleed and have limited use of my finger and have to bandage it for two weeks. Despite me offering (and her requesting for me) to buy glue to fix the old broken freezer drawer, which I did go out fo my way to buy, she said she didn’t want it, and the next day she sent me a bill through Airbnb for her broken freezer drawer, for £73. Awkward. All of that isn’t even the worst part.
- I was out at night, and she texted me very late at night that she didn’t feel comfortable for me to be out of the house after 11 pm. After some weird late night text messages she sent me, she said she would allow it if I explained to her where I was and whom I was seeing, but insisted that she would not be comfortable with it. Totally none of her business, totally inappropriate.
- She then several times accused me of not washing my hands when I came in the house and told me that she was watching me! (She was in fact wrong, I had washed my hands! She never expressed to me or on her page any rules of hand washing anyway - she made a lot of assumptions). If her new 'after 11 pm curfew' had been on her page when I considered booking her room I would have never booked it. It was creepy, imposing a curfew after I’d moved in. And she texted me late at night that I wasn’t allowed to bring guests back into the house (insinuating that I was planning on doing so, which I wasn’t).
- She had workmen in the house, totally unannounced, which she did not warn me about. when I was in the bathroom after I finished my shower one morning I opened the bathroom door to find multiple workmen standing literally outside the bathroom door while I’m in just a towel. I felt very unsafe in this accommodation.
Several times she raised her voice to me about the new curfew and the other concerns of hers she was badgering me about, and I left the house in tears one morning.
This host told me several times during my stay that she was changing her airbnb page (as well as when I checked, I could see she was changing things on the listing’s page)
Highly inappropriate behavior and bedside manner - she seemed very nervous and uncomfortable the whole time telling me her whole house was ‘exposed’ if she didn’t quadruple lock the doors from the inside. Totally imposed on my privacy and it was one sided. 'Do as I say not as I do'. Run dont walk