Honestly, I don't know where to start with this review.
This was an absolutely disastrous stay. My brother and I booked this place for a month and left it halfway through due to numerous issues with the host and the place itself. The host refused to refund us the amount of the remaining stay and accused me of gaslighting her.
In terms of cleanliness, the only clean place in the house was the kitchen and the host's own space. The house is cluttered and you'll find endless pairs of shoes in the corridor when you enter the house. Useless items that were not present in the photos where present in the room and made it feel very cluttered. When we arrived, dust balls were present all over the corners in our room. It was moderately cleaned before our arrival. You can tell the room was never properly cleaned as there were spider webs in some corners of the room. On top of it all, I had a severe allergic reaction to something in the room and ended up getting hives all over my body. Two GPs checked it and confirmed it was caused by insect bites. When I told Laila about it, she completely dismissed it and didn't even offer to have the room cleaned.
The host flat out lied about the number of people staying in the apartment.
We were specifically looking for a place that had as little people as possible living in the apartment, due to the current COVID-19 situation. In the host's ad, she mentions that she lives alone in the apartment with a toddler (I have screenshots of everything in case she had updated them now). After we booked, I had messaged her and asked her how many people are living in the apartment and she confirmed that it was only her and her daughter.
Four days after we moved in, she vacated her room and moved to her daughter's room to receive a new roommate. She only told us about that minutes before she left for her flight to Germany "Oh btw, I have a friend moving into my room". I wasn't aware this constituted a breach of Airbnb's Policies under "Travel Issues", and we had just moved in to London and spent around £1'000 on the booking and we didn't want to cause an issue out of it and decided to play along.
The roommate was a friendly person and I put zero blame on him for the situation the host has created.
We were now 5 people, instead of 4 sharing one bathroom. On top of that, visitors (friends or family of the host's and the new roommate) were coming over and sometimes spending the night over which made the whole bathroom situation unbearable.
Additionally, the bathroom was not cleaned not even once during our stay. So much for following Airbnb's cleanliness policy.
The host knew very well from the beginning that we were 2 people and only gave us one set of keys. She told me that she had installed a new lock and it came only with a limited amount of keys. It turns out, she had kept an extra set of keys for the new undisclosed roommate that ended up moving into the apartment a few days after we had checked in. When I asked if it's a possibility to make a copy of the keys, she said it cannot be done and didn't offer a solution other than "I'm always at home, it will be okay" or "You can figure things out with your brother". Being an easy going person, and not knowing about the surprise new roommate, I didn't make a deal out of it.
Laila was a cheerful person and we had nice little chats every now and then before things got bad.
She turned to be an unpleasant person to deal with when it came to remarks and requests.
On day 1, when we found that there were items in the room that were not present in the photos, we asked her if it was possible to take them out as we needed the space. She didn't entertain the idea for a second and came back with a snarky remark "I don't have space anywhere in the house". That was actually true since it was cluttered to a ridiculous extent.
When the lockdown was announced, my brother and I took things even more seriously and had asked her to respect the government's recommendations, especially that no one in the house was respecting neither Airbnb's guidelines nor the government's. When confronted, she started making stuff up about "support bubbles" and twisting their definitions to her liking to justify having people over during the lockdown. I informed her that this is unacceptable and that we will no longer be staying at her place as it is exposing us to unnecessary risks. Again, she came back with a snarky remark saying "No one is coughing in your face".
At that moment, I brought up all the negative aspects of our stay to the host after I went through Airbnb's policies, especially those dealing with having issues with the host "What if I need to cancel if I'm having issues with the host?". That's when I found out about the Travel Issues and how guests are protected in such situations.
I called and checked with Airbnb Customer Support about the undisclosed roommate situation, and all 3 operators I spoke with on the phone confirmed 100% that what she did is a breach of policy and I am entitled to a refund of the remaining amount and potentially a full refund. I also informed them about the fact that the host, the roommate and their visitors -who should not be visiting in the first place- were not respecting the Covid-19 regulations and that we had decided to leave the apartment. We booked another Airbnb that night and left the apartment.
To my surprise, the next day, I received a message