The entire place is DIRTY!
The host is a bully.
Real pictures of this place (that I took): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/d23cryltzzoc9fp/AACkQS0w8r4ia72-9sXS8Jnda?dl=0
Detailed description:
I arrived at the place around 11 PM. The place was advertised as an “Urban Farm”, but it’s really just a basement apartment in a townhouse in a densely populated area. I looked for the “farm” part so I opened the backdoor in the apartment and was greeted by a filthy storage room full of dirty miscellanies objects (picture attached). In my call later with the host, she told me I had to pass through that storage room to reach the “farm”. How would a host think it’s a reasonable expectation for guests to pass through such a suffocating and filthy storage room to reach an essential part of the property heavily advertised in the listing?
I then washed my hands in the restroom, and the hand towels were dirty with yellow booger-like objects attached on them, the towels were discolored too, they look yellow like someone peed on them (pictures attached).
I went to the bedroom, and the platform right above the bed’s headboard looked very dirty with a few stray hair. I wetted a hand towel and wiped it, it turned out that the whole platform was covered with a thick layer of black dust (pictures attached), the dust would be right above my face if I were to sleep on that bed.
The walls and window glasses in this place are also dirty with all kinds of black and yellow marks (pictures attached). And there was a fly killer racket hanging right in the middle of the living room, with parts of the dead body of a fly still hanging on it (pictures attached). Very disgusting.
I could not stay in this dumpy place, so I decided to leave. I looked up the hotels, they were much more expensive because I was booking for the same night and the immediately ensuing ones, but I had to eat up this price because I entrusted AirBnb for a reasonable accommodation a month ago when I was booking so I didn’t book any hotel room early to have a good rate.
I then called the host, explained my situation, and politely asked for a refund. She refused with a bluffing:”You must be new to AirBnb, this is not a hotel.” I told her I had stayed in quite a few Airbnb places before and I had never seen any place as uninhabitable as this one. She then retorted to say:”Well we have tons of 5-star reviews, so if you don’t like this place, then that’s your problem.” Did you mean my opinions must be determined by the opinions of the majority? How enlightening. I didn’t know America was a Communist country right now. What a bully.
During our phone conversation, she totally denied my claim that the place was dirty by saying:” No, the place is clean, because I cleaned it myself!” Oh, perfect, of course you pocketed the “cleaning fee” and did minimal cleaning yourself, instead of using it for its intended purpose and hire professional cleaners who actually know what they are doing.
She did offer to clean the apartment (just so she could claim she “made an effort”), but I refused because:
1. It was almost midnight, I just got off a long flight, I had no time or energy to wait for god-knows-how-long for a stranger to enter my living space to spend god-knows-how-long to clean it
2. I did not trust her ability or willingness to clean the place. I mean, if you did genuinely care or had the ability to, why didn’t you actually clean the place before I arrive?
3. How would I trust that the new linens that she was supposedly going to replace with are clean? She had already lost my trust, through both the dirty apartment and the bullying language she had use during our phone conversation
4. No cleaning outside of changing linens could be done within a short amount of time
It didn’t look like we were going to get an agreement, so I booked a hotel, put the key on the counter and left the place.
I had remained polite during the whole interaction, but during a later message exchange, she called me an “unpleasant” person (screenshot attached). What a professional thing for a host to say. She also threatened to give me a bad review if I do so to her.
This booking has been a thoroughly frustrating and hugely disappointment experience, and it significantly undermined my trust in AirBnb as a whole.