I'll start with the good - the house is nice and spacious. The location is excellent.
Now the bad - Our experience with Rodrigo, the host, was a mess. I will spare you most of the details, which range from the mundane (drawers stuffed with random trash and rusty screws, a dishwasher with no rollers, an exposed wire that sparked) to the absurd (we were accused of opening one of his packages, taking the phone inside, yet leaving the charger and the box?). But I'll give you the main issue and you can make your own decision.
When we arrived, the place was riddled with trash. Not just a random candy wrapper hidden between couch cushions, but a straight up pile of trash on the carpet in one of the bedrooms. In addition, both patios were covered in cigarette butts, all in plain view. For a family traveling with a 3.5-year-old and a 9-month-old, this was far from an ideal beginning. I reached out to the host, he apologized, and I didn't report it to AirBnb. I was fine to move on. But instead of appreciating my understanding, what ensued was a one-way soap opera full of messages that teetered between passive-aggressive and ALL CAPS aggressive - all ironically about the cleaning and maintenance of a house that was neither clean nor well-maintained upon our arrival. As a person who has literally never written nor received a single bad review on AirBnb, the melodrama was not for me. But if you enjoy being gaslit about trivial nonsense in colorful prose by a man living 2,000 miles away, perhaps you'll feel differently.
To be fair, many reviewers seem to have enjoyed their experience. As I said, the house itself is charming and spacious. But as you peruse the reviews, you will also come across many unpleasant ones, eerily similar to mine, all of which feature the host's dramatic rebuttals and combative lack of accountability. I have no doubt he will do the same below, citing some convoluted laundry list of offenses against him. I won't know because I am not going to read it.
But when you read it, I encourage you to ask yourself: Who is the common denominator in these negative experiences? Why are there such drastically different accounts of reality? Is that by coincidence? And in any event, it's not my house you're renting. It's his.