Spacious property, accommodated family of 4 well. Central location. Unfortunately, the floors were quite dirty upon arrival. We discovered this after noticing our two crawling infants’ legs and feet were covered in black dirt/soot after one lap around the apartment. We ended up Instacarting cleaning supplies and cleaning the floors of the entire apartment before settling in. That was a drag.
Initially, we found both Jesse and Shawn to be polite, very responsive and quite helpful with a number of issues we identified: dimmer lighting in the Master bedroom stuck on the dimmest setting (Jesse tried, but wasn’t able to rectify this during our stay). Lights in the room next to the Master not working (Jesse quickly rectified this), unbearably hot on the second level of the apartment (Jesse quickly brought a portable A/C unit for us). We even had an annoying lockout of the Master bedroom – Shawn walked us through opening the door.
Things didn’t pan out so well on the communication front for the rest of our trip, unfortunately. A day into our stay at roughly 10:30pm, Shawn called my wife (who handles most all admin/Airbnb matters when we travel) and in a rather accusatory tone, told her that he'd just received a notification from Airbnb which stated that my credit card was declined. He was literally yelling on the phone. Threatening. Gave a 30-minute timeline to pay the outstanding balance or evacuate the premises...be escorted out by the police. You can imagine how surprised we were by the incorrect assumptions, the outright rudeness and brazen threats. When trying to calm him down and explain that there had to be some sort of error, he flared up even more. Issued more threats. Doubled-down.
I was handling business matters and unfortunately offline at the time. So, convinced that this was all a gross misunderstanding and, in an effort to quell a seething Shawn, my wife hesitantly remitted $585 to Shawn. The next day, after speaking with Shawn and Airbnb, Airbnb confirmed a technical issue. Turns out the funds were there to be paid to Shawn all along. Shawn apologize to me (not my wife) for his out of line actions…yet, in his desperate attempt to hold onto the funds, refused to refund the money until Airbnb released his funds? Why hold our funds hostage if the onus of the payment falls on Airbnb? Another gross fail in customer service/customer satisfaction. When the issue of holding the funds was posed to him, he became unresponsive and rude. Even hanging up the phone on one encounter.
He eventually returned the funds 8 days after we checked out. The entire experience – his rudeness, lack of customer service, the assumptions made, his terrible communication tone/style during the encounter on Saturday night & his surprising unwillingness to quickly rectify the issue…letting it linger for over a week after our stay ended left a terribly bitter taste in our mouths + dampened the mood of our stay.
Shawn could benefit from not making assumptions about his guests and generally working on his communication style/tone.