Our stay was impacted by several factors that made our stay bad.
We are a family of four who were visiting from America. We booked Diane’s place because we wanted to be close to the airport for our last night in England. Moreover, both the host and her place had great reviews from previous guests.
Check-in time was 2:00 PM, so we let Diane know that we were on our way, we were on a train from Scotland and we’d message when we arrived.
Once our train arrived, we let her know we would be leaving soon. We messaged again, from the taxi to the place. At this point, there still had not been any response from our host.
We reluctantly let our taxi leave, even though we had not heard anything from Diane. We even talked with the taxi driver about our fear that we may have been scammed.
There we were, my husband, my two children, and myself, sat in front of the house, along with our four luggages, tired from a long train ride, with no response and no way of getting into the home.
To make matters worse, it began to drizzle rain on us and we had no umbrellas and nowhere to take shelter.
My husband asked a neighbor who was leaving if she knew if the house was indeed an Airbnb. The reply was that it was.
Finally, my phone rang! It was Diane! We were so excited that it wasn’t all a scam and that we’d soon be warm in the home.
Diane started off with apologizing that the house cleaners had not come and she was trying to get someone to come and clean before we could get into the room.
I let her know that we were fine with waiting for them to clean, but at this point we were still outside the home.
Diane began to walk me through the process of finding the keys and how to work the code, however, when we opened the lock box, there were no keys.
Diane told me she was on her way from London and it’d be an hour before she would arrive. She said she would call me back.
There we sat again, on stones, in the garden, getting wet from the rain.
The front door opened. It was a tenant from inside the home. He had the key! He said that he was supposed to put the key back into the lock box.
Thankfully, Diane called again and told us to take that key and go inside and sit in the lounge area and wait for the cleaners to come.
The cleaners came and went, so we went inside the room. It was a cute little room which originally had been a garage that was converted into a bedroom.
We put our luggage down and since it had stopped raining, we decided to walk to the store for a bite to eat.
The stores and takeaway places were only a ten minute walk. We bought some takeaway and ate in the garden,. It was a beautiful garden — full of plants, trees, flowers, and even some playground equipment for the kids to play with. There were two picnic tables, just a beautiful setting!
After eating, we went in to get ready for sleep since we were leaving very early the next morning. My husband took the bed that was a single bed and my two children and I shared the other single bed with the pull-out single mattress.
I used the toilet that was closest to our room. I was disgusted to find that there were men’s beard stubble inside the sink. Someone had shaved there and the sink was never cleaned.
I hoped that, at least, the bed linens had been changed. The pillows revealed the smell of stale sweat and body odor. I just wanted to cry. We were all so exhausted, we were to leave on the long journey back to America in just a few hours, what were we supposed to do?
I took the bath towels that had been left and put them over the pillows so that the smell would not interfere with our sleep. However, at this point, I don’t think that anything but leaving this place would have allowed for any rest.
Our sleep was interrupted by the sounds of the tenants upstairs relieving themselves in the bathroom directly above our room, the acrid smell coming from the pillows, and the most uncomfortable beds that we’d ever had the opportunity to sleep on.
After a rough night, we were pleased that the shower was AMAZING with lovely hot water and terrific pressure!
The next day, at the airport, I contacted Diane to let her know that I would like a partial refund. She offered a full refund, along with her sincere apologies.
We appreciate that Diane made an effort to make things better, but in the end, the stay was too poor to rate anything higher.
I think it may have just been “a perfect storm”, because the ratings are very high for this place.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a pleasant stay for us.