TL;DR: The place is OK. Not a problem to stay in for a few days. Unit owner isn't a good host though at all. I wouldn't recommend staying there because you'll get no support.
My GF and I stayed at Maui Banyan for 3 months. Got to see 4 units: P109, P205, P105, G105. This review is for P109.
ABOUT THE PLACE:
***Pros***:
+ Close to the beach
+ Has an amazing blender. Made smoothies every morning.
+ Has a view onto a path. You can see birds and stray cats walk around. Not as nice as being on the second floor, but better than some other units.
***Cons***:
- All the frying pans are scratched. We had to buy our own.
- Bed is extremely soft. Very uncomfortable. I had back pain after a week. Bought a mattress covering, folded it, put it on the floor and slept on that. Tried sleeping on the fold-out couch but got backpain again. Not sure if it would have been fine after that awful bed.
- Birds outside were extremely loud. Woke me up every morning with sunrise. Place was too hot without turning on AC if the patio doors were closed so we kept them open for fresh air.
ABOUT THE HOSTS:
Davis is the owner, he makes the decisions.
James is an employee(?) who helps David manage.
Veronika is an employee who cleans David's places.
***Pros***:
- Called Veronika once to ask if she'll be coming right after check out to see if we can leave the car in the parking spot for a few hours. She was nice.
***Thoughts***:
- James is pretty responsive via phone. He missed a couple of my messages until I called him out on it days later. He didn't call me back a couple of times when he said he would.
***Cons*** (Read the long one, as it is pretty bad)
- In our request we asked for early check out because we're working professionals and need to be in meetings mid-day. We had to vacate the previous unit by 11am, and asked to move into this unit at 11. Host accepted our offer. Then I got a message from James saying he can't check in early. WTF? I called James to explain that we'd already agreed upon early check in and money was already transferred. He said no go. I threatened legal action and demanded my money back for unfair business practices. David said he was sorry for the confusion and offered us a free night as an apology. Sounds good, EXCEPT that when we tried to check the night before he said we can't check in and that he never promised us that we can check in before. I was in meetings so I didn't respond to his rants, but eventually I think he read the full thread, realized his mistake and asked James/Veronika to clean the unit and get it ready. By the time we were ready to go there they asked for a few hours to get the unit ready. 3 hours later I asked if it was ready since I haven’t heard anything, and got a reply that we were good to move in. Bleh.
- We reported a few maintenance things like the faucet being loose and bedroom doors not closing. They said they won’t fix anything during our 2 months stay because of Covid 19. In the middle of it we got a visit from pest control asking to let them in to spray the unit while we were in it! Hell no! And they should still do maintenance requests.
- In our 2-month stay we had to ship some things to the unit. Most of them were left at the front desk (before that was closed due to covid). But some of our mail ended up in the mailbox even though we explicitly instructed them to not use the mailbox. Oh well. We reached out to James / David to help us recover the shipped items. James told us there is no mailbox (lie). After we sent them a photo of the mailbox with “P109” on it he said they don’t have the key for it (lie). I’m 100% confident David and/or James have the key but didn’t want to help us. Didn’t offer a “recover your items for a fee” thing either. Just denied any possibility of us getting our items.
- [This is the real problem with David]. A few weeks into our 2-month stay a construction started at the unit above us. They were literally using a jackhammer above us to scrape off the floor substrate so they could refill it and put in new flooring. It was horribly loud. I complained to the workers. They said they have a permit to be there from 8-5pm every weekday for as long as they see fit. They were there for 3.5 weeks!! I immediately complained to David / James, but didn’t hear back for a day. That’s 1 day of noise I couldn’t escape. I tracked down the general manager for Maui Banyan who said they approved construction because David (unit owner) FAILED TO NOTIFY them that he would have guests staying at the unit during Covid 19. We told David that we need a place to stay while this construction is going on. But he offered us 3 choices: A - stay where we are and shut up, B - rent another, tiny unit from him (as well as this one and pay him for both units), or C - move to another, shittier unit next to a road with no view for the same money. Those are all terrible choices. He should have offered for us to use one of his other units during constructions and given us a refund for the days we were inconvenienced! But we had no choice. Needed to dial into meetings and we didn’t want to give up the unit we hated less. So we rented another