In summary: Stay at Doug’s you won’t regret it.
If you want more info, read below
We’re a couple in our 30s from Montreal. We traveled to California for 2 weeks and stayed in San Diego (at Doug’s) for 5 days
Pros:
Location, location, location. So close to the beach. Many cafés, restaurants and bars within walking distance. Grocery store nearby. Seriously: Amazing location.
Within the appartement you’ll find (among other things) a washer and dryer: Big plus if you travel for a few weeks like we did. Also amazing to have a full kitchen so you can cook a few “home meals” yourself. Speaking of the appartement, it was super clean and being a geek myself I appreciated the smart TVs in every room.
Coffee was provided (thank you!). Some beach towels as well as two beach chairs.
Communicating with the host was easy, while I suspect some of the messages were actually automated messages from a bot… but hey, I can’t blame a host managing many properties to use various tools for efficiency. Nevertheless, communication was easy and fast. Doug even recommended some restaurants (some of which we did try). Overall the check-process was simple and the place was easy to find.
We did not use much of the outdoor facilities (there’s a beach shower, bbq and some picnic tables), but it was nice to have these available.
Despite the “cons” below, we would definitely recommend.
Cons:
The appartement isn’t too well isolated and it was quite noisy: Whenever an adjacent neighbour would take a shower or flush the toilet, the water noise was very much noticeable in our appartement. Same goes for the back alley: The garbage truck at 6 am felt like a car was backing up in our bedroom (and the window was closed).
A minor point, the shower pressure did not work well. The diverter somehow did not send all the water up in the shower head, so half the water was flowing from the faucet and the other half from the shower head (with limited pressure).
We cooked there for a few nights, it was again awesome to have a working kitchen. However we found some of the cookware was basic and a bit old. This again is minor, but worth noting if you intend to cook a lot. Also the basics are provided, but a few basics were missing that would have made it an even greater experience (for example cooking oil/spray, salt and pepper would have been appreciated)
Finally, the included parking was a big must for us, but we were told once we arrived that there was no assigned parking (it is a “first come first serve” basis). Please note: We must say that we did NOT have any issues with it, but we also kind of hesitated to take the car on some days, fearing to have issues parking when we came back. So if you intend to drive in and out of Mission beach and come back late at night or on weekend, there’s a chance you won’t have a spot, which for us was a bit of a worry.