Warning: this house has a rat infestation and judging from the repairs to the crawl space vents, it appears to have been a historical problem.
Beyond the rat problem, which was a trip killer for my family (wife and toddlers), the house is old, relatively grimy, and poorly furnished. If the place was a $100/night or you were a bachelor looking for a crash pad, maybe it would be ok and a matter of “you get what you pay for,” but at $300+ and a family with kids involved, the bar was higher.
We didn’t discover the rat problem initially, but did notice a bunch of problems:
There was a smell of decay coming from the kitchen under the stove
The floors were a bit sticky, especially in the areas where toddlers like to crawl around and reach around
The toilet flap was so old that on every flush, you’d end up having to reach into the basin to properly seat it
Lights in the bedroom and living room were so dim we could barely read our kids a book and in one room was just an old chair in a corner with a lamp on top of it.
We tried to make the best of it and even bought our own Swiffer to mop the floors, but
then our nanny, who has no filter, arrived and got a whiff of the smell in the kitchen and blurted out “why are you staying there, there are rats in this house...”
So after a bit of searching, things started to add up. Just outside on the patio near the grill there were 50+ rat droppings scattered along the fence. As we were looking around, my wife actually saw a rat run along the fence. That started to explain the mysterious bites my wife complained of the previous nights (likely rat mites) and the rat smell emanating from the stove’s connection to the crawlspace under the house.
So we contacted the hosts and told them that we weren’t comfortable keeping our two toddlers in that situation and our intention was to leave the next day and asked to shorten our trip. The host then went quiet for two days and then only after our prompting again after we already departed, did they respond that our reasons for leaving weren’t sufficient to warrant a shortened stay.
Shameful display of greed and/or denial. It wasn’t like we’d sat on the booking for months. We’d just booked the previous week. Any host with any pride would have just said you’re free to go, just pay for the days you stayed. That’s what I would have done. I’ve had an Airbnb vacation rental for 5yrs with a 4.9 rating.
When I responded to them that denying our request to shorten the stay was both ethically wrong as well as bad business because they’d certainly get a bad review that exposed their rat problem, they told me that I was blackmailing them. My reply was that the definition of blackmail was when you take something from someone. Quite the opposite in our case. Something was taken from us.
They wouldn’t acknowledge the rat issue with us, but told Airbnb that it was a squirrel and not their responsibility, which is laughable given that my wife saw the rat, the smell in the kitchen coming from plumbing connections to the crawl space wasn’t from squirrels, and regardless when are 50+ droppings in the patio from of any kind rodent acceptable?
Only one positive on this place: there is a nice park for kids nearby. It was the only enjoyable part of the stay.