Don't stay here.
I'm not going to deny that the location is incredible. Being a 5-minute walk from Waikiki beaches is insane and amazing. BUT I'm sure there are much better places you could stay in Waikiki that are still just as close to the beaches. Because of that I'm NOT going to let the location cloud my review.
I like Airbnb because it feels like you are staying in a home away from home. It usually feels like you are working with a person. That person owns the place you’ll be staying at and it usually just feels like you’re hanging out in their home. The personal touch is so important. This is why I don’t book with Marriot or other hotels.
Well, this place does not feel like that. It also doesn't feel like a hotel though, which would have been fine. It feels like it’s run by a really bad corporation.
There are, I think, three guys who are supposedly in charge of communication through the Airbnb app. None of them talk to each other and they won't know anything about your stay when they talk to you. They could very easily read the conversation history but it never seems like they bother.
It also feels like they purposefully don't use clear language when communicating with you. My problems first started as I booked the place. Before I pushed that final “book” button I reached out to them and asked them about their cancellation policy.
This was the first time that I booked a monthly rental and I was very unclear about what I could potentially get refunded if I decided to cancel after 24 hours. I asked, "Since we haven't booked our flights yet, I wanted to make sure I understand your cancellation policy. Do you allow date changes? If not, when would we need to cancel our booking by to receive a full refund?".
They responded, " aloha - yes, we can accommodate change, assuming we have the availability, and the cancellation policy as sated in the reservation is anytime up to 5 days prior to arrival - Mark G.H. Property Manager".
At the time, it felt as if they were communicating to me that I could get a full refund up to 5 days prior to arrival. I felt this way because I had asked about a “full refund”. They could have easily said, “There’s no way to get a full refund, like you asked about, after 24 hours. We would recommend waiting to book until you are more sure of your dates.”
Like I said, they weren't clear. It felt like they were trying to use deceptive language to make it seem like their policy was better than it is. When I reached out to them trying to cancel they let me know that I was only going to get the cleaning fee back – roughly $370. I had hind-sight at that point to see they hadn’t actually promised me I could get a full refund. I had just assumed because of how I had initiated the conversation. But it certainly felt sneaky and deceptive.
I wasn’t going to just lose out on a VERY significant amount of money so we kept the booking but I knew at that point, it wasn’t going to be a good stay.
We didn't get any sort of communication from them about how to check into our place until hours before we were supposed to check in. If I hadn’t been in the middle of a massive move, with a baby and a dog – I would have messaged them. But that isn’t my job!
And when they did message us check in information they sent us the information for the wrong place! They sent us the actual information for check-in 2.5 hours later. We didn’t think that the information could be for two different places, we thought that message was just a follow-up. So, you can imagine our confusion when we arrived. We had the keys in hand and were halfway up the stairs before our gut told us that something was wrong.
The message had a phone number that we could call “in case you have any difficulty during your 'contactless check-in.'”. When my husband called them to try and sort this out the person he spoke to was rude, curt and downright annoyed that he was getting called, even though this whole scenario was their mistake.
When we did get to the right place we used the loading and unloading area to get our things up to our room. Remember, we were moving to Hawaii. This would be a temporary residence until we got into our place. So, not only did we have a dog, and a baby, we also had a lot of very large suitcases (containing all our possessions basically). Well, they weren’t happy with us using their advertised loading and unloading area.
There is not parking on the residence, but the listing says that there is loading and unloading. There are three parking spots underneath the complex. The people who are coming to clean frequently use those parking spots to be able to bring their supplies, bedding and linen. But when somebody who is staying there wants to use that parking spot for literally maybe 5 minutes to bring their suitcases upstairs they get super annoyed at you. I wasn’t there for this but my husband got practically interrogated by someone about parking there for a bit when we first arrived.
Oh, and forget about sending your husband out to get the car wherever you’ve parked it so he can come back and pick you and your baby up. They’ll be annoyed at that too.
When we finally got to our place, they only gave us one card. We had two people staying at the Airbnb. It's not like they were unaware that there were two people staying there. You have to tell Airbnb how many people are going to be in the room. So, I'm not quite sure why they only gave us one card.
When I asked for a second card they acted put out and annoyed. It also took me reminding them again for them to get that second card out to us. They said that somebody would be dropping by our room with the card. The 3 guys in charge of communication must not be talking to each other because they, instead, put it in the lock box. Much later they sent me a message saying it was in the lock box. It was like they sort of expected I would know it was there, for some reason.
They didn’t give me a code though. I’m both glad and not happy that the code hadn’t changed from when we checked in. Because it hadn’t changed, I was able to get the card without having to communicate with them (which is like pulling teeth). Because it hadn’t changed though, it feels as if there’s a security issue. How long has that code been the same? Could anyone who has ever stayed there potentially come back, find a card and use it to get into the complex? Thinking about that did not make me feel safe.
Most of the time when you arrive at an Airbnb there's some sort of booklet to communicate to you what you should do while you're staying at the place. The booklet explains things that they expect you to do, things they expect you not to do and any number of other items. Potentially, if they're a good host, they’ll include some good information about the nearby area – insider tips if you will. This was not there at all in this Airbnb. Considering the communication I had experienced up to this point I wasn't surprised.
They marketed this place on Airbnb as a remote work location. Considering how massively hard it was to cook there and how much time you would be spending in the location if you were working there, I would not recommend trying to work here. This is what I was doing and it was not fun. However, if there’s one credit I can give them, the internet was pretty fantastic.
I'll talk about the actual place/room now. It's fine. It's not bad, it's not good, it's fine. But there are DEFINITELY things about it that are really bad.
The kitchen sink didn't have hot water! When a place touts having a kitchen, the kitchen sink should have hot water.
Speaking of touting a kitchen, that is a poor excuse for a kitchen. There is hardly any counter space. There is a dual hot plate that you can plug in for cooking on but when that's plugged in and on the counter you have no other counter space for anything else. There's no oven and the storage space is severely lacking. For a place that you would stay at for a month you would really want to be able to go to the grocery store and store your food throughout the kitchen. They could have very easily put cabinets on the walls which would have increased the counter space because you could put appliances in those cabinets.
There were two knives in the kitchen. One was a bread knife and one was a small skinny long one. One was colored pink and one was colored purple which makes me think that they bought one of those packs of like eight different kinds of knives and only put two or three in each apartment. Basically, what was I supposed to do with a bread knife that was mostly useless? Hawaii and Waikiki are not known for their bread. Why did they give me a bread knife?
There was a window above the front door without blinds that could see directly into the place. Our room was right by the stairs so anyone coming down the stairs could see, say, our bed. I’m just glad my husband is tall enough that he was able to stick some empty diaper boxes there to stop people from being able to see inside.
There is a smart TV but there's nothing to watch on it. You need to put your own sign in information into the system to watch Netflix or Amazon shows on it. We never touched it. I would have rather they spent that money on the so-called “kitchen”. Most people travel with a laptop making that TV sort of superfluous.
Look, what they had was FINE but it felt like there was no heart or soul put into the place. If any of the people who owned it had actually spent any time LIVING there they would have made many dramatic improvements that would have made staying there feel like a home.
I’m not sure if there was anyone in the room next to us, above us, or below us. If there was, we never heard them. However, the windows and the doors must have had something wrong with them. They weren’t sealed. We could hear every tiny noise from outside. If anybody was on their balcony I could hear their full-on conversations. I heard every time somebody walked up and down the stairs. To clarify, I’m not talking about the window in the bathroom that was meant to open to allow the humidity to exit.
The worst part is you could hear ALL of the traffic passing by and at night, there are drag races; crazy, intense, ear-splitting drag races. These cars were peeling by so quickly and so fast with their massively loud engines, that they set off car alarms. We were woken up every single night by the sound. It really sucks having to nightly soothe a baby who was woken up by a scary sound.
Part of the reason I had tried to cancel the booking is that we wouldn’t need to stay in the place for a full month. So, we left the place early. I tried to communicate with them about what would be needed with the room or with the keys but I got no response. We were able to put our keys back in the lock box with the same code (once again – security issue). I just sent them a message saying that I had returned the keys.
To that I got a simple “Thank you.” and I thought that was it. However, the day before our “check out”, we got a message with instructions of how checkout was supposed to take place. I sent a message back explaining that if they would have just read the message right above that one they had sent, they would see that I had already returned the cards. The only response I got back was someone saying that they apologized but that checkout message was an automatic one.
I know there are good Airbnbs out there. I’ve stayed at 1 or 2 of them. But my experience with this one has almost turned me off Airbnb for good. “Mark’s” profile made it seem like he was that person renting out their place for some extra cash. But it’s actually “Hawai’i Americana Realty. I know that his OVER 122 listings have some good reviews but it’s not worth it. If you’re going to use Airbnb, stay with the person who cares – not the corporate company who could care less about you.