I’ll start by saying that if you’re like me and want to give this place the benefit of the doubt while you ignore the negative reviews and focus on the positive ones because it’s a great deal for the area…please take a moment to read this review and consider searching for other places to stay!
We arrived on a cold (>20° Fahrenheit) Chicago evening around 8pm and the window in one of the bedrooms was wide open with no screen in it. The heat was trying hard to compensate, but the apartment was frigid. At first the 4 of us were giggling at the absurdities we were finding like no curtains or blinds in the whole place (we joked about the “bright and sunny” name), the brand new blankets that we had to take out of packaging to make beds ourselves, and memory foam that was hard and uncomfortable topped with 1 flimsy, thin pillow each. We are an adaptable group that would have brushed this off until we found 3 nails, 2 screws, chunks of drywall, and shards of wood that we kept stepping on. Between that and all of the visual hair and dirt on the ground it was clear that they didn’t bother to clean the floors or windowsills before our arrival. When we booked our stay we specified that there were 4 of us on our stay and we’re provided with 0 washcloths, 0 hand towels, and 2 bath towels (one of which was covered in a white stain). At this point our group is feeling a little grossed out and bait-and-switched by the nice photos on the listing, but think maybe this is a result of maybe something coming up and normal cleaning not being able to be provided. We used Airbnb’s help function to contact the host and request a partial refund after explaining the conditions we were met with. The host could have obliged and we would have moved on and left a “meh” review, but instead we received no apology, no reassurance that this was unusual, the response that asking for about 1/4th of what we paid was unreasonable, and were told we arrived a day late which untrue and irrelevant to our concerns.
I wish that was the worst of it…
The final morning of our stay we cracked a window in one of the bedrooms because there was a slight sewage-y smell throughout our stay that we couldn’t stand anymore. When we went to close the window and finally check out of this filthy place, the window fell out of the frame and hit my partner in the head. She is still dealing with head, back, and neck pain days later and the hosts still did not offer any compensation or much of an apology for the literal nightmare stay we had in this property.
If you are faced with a situation that this apartment is your absolute only option for your trip to Chicago, STAY HOME.