The positives- The neighborhood was lovely and the house had very nice furniture and finishes.

The negatives- The host didn't respond to initial messages/questions written 3 days prior to arrival until the day of arrival, leaving us to question if we actually had a secure reservation or not. He finally responded the day of the reservation with check-in details and an apology for not responding due to "not receiving notifications".

Upon arriving we found the house had not been cleaned after the previous guests, which was very frustrating given we had two young kids who were grumpy and needed a nap. We had to make beds with make-shift sheets found in closets because the host was not answering his phone or messages on airbnb.

We also had an issue of not being able to open the front door and had to nearly break ourselves out of the house with a butter knife. Again, host was not made available during the first few hours of check-in so we had to figure it out ourselves.

Three hours after checking in, a woman came into the house without knocking. She didn't speak any of the same languages we spoke, but I realized she was the cleaning person once she made her way to the bedrooms to undo all the beds we had just made. I tried to tell her that we already made the beds and we really just wanted rest and privacy at that point but she didn't understand and stayed for around 30 minutes basically ignoring me because she didn't understand what I was saying. Finally she called the host because she also was unable to open the front door. At that point he directed me in providing a temporary fix to the door situation and quickly apologized for the issues, citing his job in emergency services as the reason he wasn't available to assist with all the problems we had upon checking in.

Overall- probably the worst experience I've had with Airbnb. I saw this listing had really great reviews so I expect this was a one-off but I was so disappointed with this, especially given the fact we paid for a cleaning fee and clearly did not have a clean listing to enjoy. Hoping the host finds a way to make this right for us, and to make sure the next guests don't have the same issues.