I’d like to preface this review by saying that I never actually write reviews. Only in cases where the experience is very good or very bad do I think it’s worth the effort. My wife and I have stayed at a number of Airbnb’s, and our experiences have generally been great. Our stay with Zencity was anything but.
We were staying for a week in Chicago for my work, with my wife planning to work full time from the Airbnb for the week. My wife is also pregnant. By the second day of our stay with Zencity, the unit began to reek of cigarette smoke, and was at its worst during the day for the hours that my wife was working from the unit. Secondhand smoke is a terrible risk to a developing fetus. The next morning I reached out to the host to resolve the issue. We requested either to be moved to a comparable unit or be refunded the remainder of our stay. It took multiple messages for them to respond, and even once we were in the middle of the conversation, the average response time to a message took hours. The resolution that they offered was either to move us halfway across the city to a much cheaper unit or to request that my wife find somewhere else to work for a day while they used an ozone unit to temporarily reduce the smell (even getting to this point in the conversation took over 24 hours).
Not wanting to endanger my wife/our baby, we moved to a hotel and alerted the host so that we could be refunded the remainder of our stay. The host claimed to be considering the refund repeatedly over multiple days, but on the last night of our stay, requested that we cancel the reservation. After cancelling, they alerted us that they were denying our refund request because they couldn’t confirm that we weren’t in the unit because we hadn’t hit the “cancel” button in the Airbnb app despite informing them that we had vacated partway through the stay. Taken together, it seems as though they were just delaying responding so that they wouldn’t even have to offer the 50% refund in their cancellation policy. Also, the TV does not work and unsurprisingly, Zencity never responded to our message at the beginning of the week asking them to fix it.
This experience was all-around terrible. We will never be staying with Zencity again and we recommend that you do not either.