I've had a handful of experiences with Airbnb, and I gotta say, I wasn't expecting this predicament at all. Finding a location and pricing for our girls trip in San Diego, we stumbled on this modest cottage home and thought it would be a great fit for our vacation after a heavy month of work.
It started out great, where Bill contacted us at 9am and told us the cottage was ready and available for early check-in. We were excited since our plan was to kill some time earlier in the day and now we had an opportunity to drop off our belongings and explore the area.
The instructions for the key pad code was simple and we got in very easily. We noticed a musty smell coming in but chalked it up to poor circulation with the building. Thankfully the place has fans and AC units that allowed us to filter the smell out quickly.
The place was semi clean, where the mostly used areas was cleaned in the surface, but plenty of spiders and spider webs were still present. The pictures used to promote the place is outdated, a lot of wear and tear is apparent so I suggest to keep track of the damage you see and share the information with Bill so he knows that this damage wasn't caused by you. I will post pictures to show examples. One of the big ones was the room facing the back yard, the sliding closet door was broken, and some dry wall on the bottom corner of the doorway was exposed.
There were no instructions left on how to use the AC unit, the cable/Netflix, or which remote belonged to which device. Trial and error was used for each of those things with the exception of the wifi (which the connection is limited). It was a bit awkward to find out that in order for us to stream movies, the owner had to stop watching his own football game to accommodate us.
While we waited 20 min for a movie to load, I was about to use the microwave and I immediately got a strong nasty odor of rotten fish. Turns out someone left a plate of salmon in there for a very long time and no one thought of looking in to cleaned it up. It didn't help that the smell traveled to the living room since the kitchen is so close to the living room.
To get rid of the smell, we blasted the AC and opened the front wooden door to let the air out but it left the room really cold. I decided to get a blanket from the closet with the one broken door where I spotted some extra sheets earlier and got a face full of spider webs. Of course I shared all this information with Bill and he apologized and offered to reimburse us completely if we wanted to leave.
After discussing with my friend if we can find something last min we asked Bill that we can stay as long as he reimburse us the cleaning fee. He responded with "I'll think about it". This was around 7pm. We were hoping to hear back at least 20min later but still didn't get a response. So we waited by watching a movie on Netflix. By 10pm we got tired and decided to head to bed.
As we prepared for the night I heard my friend gasp in the next room. I quickly go to see what is wrong and she looks at me shocked and said she found a toe nail clipping in between the sheets of her bed. I couldn't believe it and she pointed it out along with dirt and debris that was inside the sheets. I was so shocked that I took pictures and then went to my bedroom to see if something similar happened to the sheets of my bed. As I uncover the top covers, I notice that there was sand and hair, like someone went to the beach and decided to take a nap inside the bed and they made the bed the next day.
By then we had to pull the plug on our 4 nights and 3 day stay. It was the 3rd strike to the list of things that have gone wrong. Normally I would understand that some things are out of our control, but when things escalated to the Salmond or the dirty linens, I didn't see Bill or his co owners make an effort to want to rectify the situation by offering to come over to clean the microwave or change the sheets.
In fact, communication stopped when I asked for the full refund. There was no confirmation that he got our message of the beds or if there were special instructions to lock up after we leave. We ended up booking a hotel in down town (for much cheaper of price and better services) and telling him that we were leaving. I think it'll take a while for me to use Airbnb after this experience.