I am frustrated, annoyed, and concerned.
If the Airbnb app would have let me I would have left a ZERO star review. I don't even know where to begin. We ultimately left the property within 15 minutes of arrival due to serious safety concerns which I will describe later but will start with other numerous problems with this listing and the Host. Inaccuracies in the listing are too numerous to count. Wear and tear on the home was wide-spread. The property was described as 2 years old and never lived in but I would add likely never maintained. It is clear this place had seen some wild parties due to the wear and tear inside the home as well as on the decks. No real attempts have been made to maintain this property down to painting over stains on the walls with the wrong color paint. Door handles hanging off. Multiple stains on the walls throughout the house. Cracked furniture. Stained and pitted floors and furniture. Rust in the freezer. Cluttered garage that required moving contents around so I could park or access the washer/dryer. Stains on the master bedroom duvet cover. Dried pee on the master bedroom toilet and seat. Very dirty outside windows that interfered with the view. Large patches of crumbling plaster/dry wall around the master bedroom window frame. This is not an exhaustive list.
I am mystified and have gone back and looked at the listing photos and reviews again after returning home. I can only guess the pictures in the listing were right after the home was built. I absolutely recognize that a home exposed to the elements like a beachfront home will take its toll but that to me emphasizes even more that the home needs to have regular upkeep and maintenance.
The above issues were beyond disappointing for a property at this price level and incredibly frustrating how inaccurate this listing was portrayed but the main issues for this bad review really all revolve around safety issues that made the property not safe for occupancy.
1. Outdoor metal cable guardrail with extensive rust/corrosion on all deck levels. On one level the top rail was separated from the post and balanced on it and in close proximity there were multiple areas of slack in the cables as well as at least one ruptured section of cable creating a gap large enough for a child to fall at least 15 feet through to the boulders below on the beach. This does not meet California code for occupancy. There were also multiple areas of deck surface buckling with disintegrating sections of concrete covering on the deck with some rust or corrosion underneath. These were just the issues we could see on a quick survey of the property but this drew into question the integrity of all sections of the outdoor decks and railing.
2. Two of the interior stairwell bannisters were very loose and shaky which I discovered when I almost fell trying to climb the stairs to get to the master bedroom.
3. There were at least two exterior back doors whose locks and hinges were rusted/corroded so much that you couldn't lock or even completely close them. One was on the side of the house (beach access) and the other one was on the lower deck door (street access). Either of these could allow anyone to have access to the back exterior of the home and break in at any time. Again, a safety issue.
4. Finally there was a strong petroleum odor immediately apparent on entry onto the main level of the house near the kitchen/garage/air conditioning intake vent that gave me a headache and made me feel sick within a 15 minutes of being in the home.
After discovering these safety issues as well as concerns about what other issues might be present we left the property immediately and I contacted Airbnb since these issues could not be resolved in a timely fashion. Airbnb stated they would contact the Host to address these issues and concerns and that I didn't need to do that. Over the next few hours I was asked to provide pictures and video to Airbnb support which were forwarded to the host, David. Since it was clear this was not going to be resolved quickly we rented a hotel room for the night. After almost 2 days of back and forth with Airbnb and the host we were told by Airbnb that although they were very sorry, this wasn't covered under the Aircover protection plan. No attempts were made by them to book us a hotel room, find a comparable property instead, or provide a full refund. Later the host David texted me outside of the Airbnb app and asked me to communicate with him in this manner on his cellphone rather than through the app. This seemed very shady to me, as though he didn't want a permanent text stream to exist in the app. He finally offered a partial refund but still wanted to charge us for 3 nights even though we left immediately and never stayed at the property. Citing that if we accepted his offer then he would try to re-rent the property. I told him that the property wasn't safe to rent until the property could have the above-mentioned repairs and be inspected for any additional safety issues. I refused the partial refund and again asked for a full refund. He responded that he had sent his maintenance person over to look at the property but none of those issues existed (despite my having pictures and videos to the contrary) and that we should just stay there since he couldn't re-rent the property. I can only assume that the maintenance person he sent over was the same one who was supposed to be maintaining the property all along but hadn't been and just told him that everything was just fine.
I am still trying to work with Airbnb to resolve this issue.
David