We had a poor experience with Marianne, after which she gave us a full refund for our one night stay.

Due to her poor communication of her needs, Marianne was quite upset with and rude to us for arriving at 9:11pm (she wished that we had arrived earlier, but did not make this desire known to us, despite our specific request earlier that day asking for her preferred check-in arrival time. Her page says "anytime after 4:00pm" and we had told her we would arrive after dinner, to which she replied "No worries, enjoy"). When we arrived, she could barely contain her anger. She did not introduce herself, just curtly said "here's your room, here are your towels" and when Maura was mid-sentence trying to engage her and smooth things over (since Marianne was so obviously upset), she cut Maura off and left the room to go upstairs for the night. There were no niceties- no small talk, or even a smile. She did not show us the bathroom or ask if we needed anything. As we were out at our car grabbing our bags, Marianne came out and tried to apologize for her rudeness, but continued to blame us without any attempt to have a discussion. At that point she did ask if we needed anything, but it was so clearly forced and disingenuous, and we were already so disturbed by our previous interaction (Maura in tears) that the offer was, at that point, ridiculous.

We felt very unwelcome and uncomfortable staying in a private (unlocked) room in her home after this encounter. We left very early in the morning (5:00am) in order to avoid further conflict, and wrote her a message explaining our frustration with her lack of manners, asking for a partial refund for our distress. She replied, "Sure, no problem" (no apology or explanation) and gave us a $98 refund. We were appreciative of the refund, which mostly made up for the experience, and is hopefully an indication that this is not normally how she treats her guests (as also evidenced by the many positive reviews on her page). However, we felt it was important to share our experience, since host hospitality is especially crucial when renting a room in someone's home. Note that if you book with Marianne, you should arrive before 9:00pm. We suggested to Marianne to make this explicit to guests, in order to avoid a situation like ours.