I’ve never had such an uncomfortable number of episodes in an Airbnb stay. I am a university teacher and due to my job I have been in a number of Airbnbs so I know how to behave and what to expect of this service. A number of times Teresa made me feel as if I were a misbehaved and ungrateful person she had invited to her house instead of someone paying to share a space.
I have always had good reviews and I’ve been in Airbnb homes for years, and no host had complained as much about... well, everything.
Long story short: they complained to airbnb about me cooking after 9:30 and about me being loud (on their cricking wooden floors). Airbnb told me not to worry because I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Airbnb also told me that the hosts should specify things such as cooking timetables and that if they hadn’t I could cook whenever it was convenient for (which was between 21:00 and 22:00). You cannot just make rules as things go.
Some people are not made to share their house and I think that’s Teresa’s case. If you want to control every single detail of your houae you shouldn’t have airbnb guests there.
Anyway, I used to have my meals out most days (even more often after the complaints). It feels to me that complaining about the few times I had dinner there is a bit unfair. Yet, apparently there were plenty of different things to complain about .
At first it was small things such as “try not to step to hard on the wood floor” (which is a bit difficult but I tried), but then it got worse:
- I walked too strong for Teresa’s taste (which was endedless repeated to me throughout my stay)
- My food smeelled too much (in spite of the fact that I mostly cooked the same things she cooked— but yeah, I guess my chicken was too smelly for some reason).
- I was checked upon every time I was in the kitchen. She was constantly entering the kitchen, too obviously checking on me, and always supposedly looking for things she would not find. What she found however was stuff to comment upon and to criticize about my cleaning skills. I have never felt so uncomfortable cooking around people.(this stopped after I wrote to airbnb about it)
The worse part was when Teresa told me that she would kick me out of the house if continued cooking late (that is 21:30 to 22:30). Their airbnb profile didn’t specify that and she wanted me to re-organize my whole day so I would cook when they were done having dinner but not to late for her. She even told me she knew that was not specified in the ad but she basically didn’t care. What could I do? Of course I didn’t want to be kicked out and hace to find a new house in the middle of my stay... I was even afraid of telling them how uncomfortable I was because of course she had already told me twice in the same conversation that she would cancel my stay.
Other than that the house and its location were fine. Perhaps a bit too away from the subway (12-15 min by foot). Also, the neighborhood is not the kind of place you want to go out at night.