This apartment and experience was both the best and the worst of AirBnB.
First, the good news: The apartment was great for what we wanted to do, namely, explore Chicago with our two teenage daughters (17 and 19). The location was fantastic. The apartment was really spacious (it was actually bigger than in looked in the pictures), with a large central room, two good-sized bedrooms, and a ton of closet space. The small study was a great addition when people had to work online, and having the extra half bath was convenient. The space was light-filled, with big windows, and the A/C worked well -- we were very comfortable even in a hot Chicago summer. The place was remarkably quiet, given that it was on a busy intersection. Unlike other Air BnBs we've had in the past, there were no surprise restaurant smells. If this were a private home the bathroom would need to be completely redone and updated, but it was functional for an AirBnB. Overall, the building and the apartment have a sort of decayed elegance that was charming (real parquet floors!). The place was clean, with fresh new towels and linens. The neighborhood is terrific, and the girls could come and go on their own. It was super easy to take the bus downtown. It was much better staying here than the 4 of us cramming in a double hotel room, and much cheaper than the 4 of us staying in 2 hotel rooms.
The bad news: We had a disastrous check-in experience. We had received instructions on how to retrieve the keys to the building and the apartment from a lockbox outside the building. Check-in time was 3:00. We actually arrived at the address at 2:30, and respectfully waited in the car (parked in a loading zone) until 3:00 in case there were cleaners in the apartment. At that point I jumped out and put the code into the lockbox -- which turned out to be empty. (The next day, when we finally got into the apartment, the keys were hanging on the peg with the "return keys here" sign -- we presume the cleaning crew simply forgot to return the keys to the lockbox.) From my fading iPhone, I sent several messages to Zencity through AirBnB, and my husband and I both called the Zencity contact number -- he got through to someone, but as soon as he said that there was no key in the box the call was dropped (or they hung up, he thinks); I was on hold for 35 minutes before giving up. So there we were, sitting in the car for about two hours in a loading zone with a car full of stuff and teenagers in the blazing sun (thank you, nearby Target bathrooms) with no Plan B. I went on Booking.com and managed to find us a hotel room. We finally heard from a Zencity rep around 6:00, and he gave us the codes for the other lockboxes (the "backup" box and cleaners). But by that point we were already in the hotel. Zencity did agree to refund us for the amount of our hotel bill for that first night, but it was terribly inconvenient and stressful. My sense was that Zencity is an organization based in California, and that they didn't have anyone actually on the ground in Chicago. If that is the business model, they need to have a hotline of sorts where people can immediately speak to someone if there is a problem. They advertise a one-hour response time, but that was not our experience.