PROS: This place is located near magazine street and has a decent wifi connection.
CONS: Can I say "hell hole" on here? I'm pretty sure that this is a bait and switch scam (Google that for more specifics, I wish I did)
After months of planning a 30 day stay in NOLA with my girlfriend, Reginald messaged me on the day of our reservation to say that prior guests "damaged the place" we reserved and it would take weeks to fix. He said he had a more expensive place he could put us in temporarily for two weeks at no additional cost, and then move us again to a third even better place. It sounded a little fishy to me for a city that doesn't allow rentals less than one month, but the listing for the new place looked good (named "musicians cove" if you want to check out his listing), it had okay reviews and most of all we didn't want to be stranded in NOLA without a room. So we agreed.
This replacement was attached to an abandoned building. It was dark, smelled like mildew and was dirty. The couch.. oh god the couch. It was COVERED in semen! Or maybe it was mold? Probably both. Either way, it was so horrible we didn't want to be in the same room with it let alone sit on it. I should also point out that this reservation was made during COVID, so my girlfriend and I were legitimately concerned about contracting the virus from this unclean place.
Looking into how to solve this matter, we turned to airbnb. The website said to try and resolve things with the host first, so I messaged Reginald. Hours later he got back to me saying "contact airbnb and i'll give you a full refund" but by this point more than 24 hours had passed, which is the window where airbnb can easily intervene. Now we were bound to his "cancelation policy" (where you can be refunded for days after the first 30 days) Airbnb made us cancel in order to dispute our stay even though Reginald would not be obligated to pay AND because its canceled, that means we wouldn't be able to leave feedback to warn future guests of this scam. I looked back at all the feedback on Reginald's other listings and noticed all his positive reviews are over a year old! I complained about this loophole to airbnb and how it is a perfect way for hosts to scam people and avoid negative feedback, which I think is why they are letting me leave this feedback now.
After a lot of back and forth with airbnb's support, and maybe a bit of pressure knowing that we could now leave a review, Reginald gave us a refund for everything except $275, saying that that was for the days that we stayed. The original quote we were given was $42 a night! So that extra $191 charge he took from us was for what? 300% sales tax? the cleaning that he didn't do? Honestly I don't know. Reginald is almost entirely unresponsive to my messages and will not explain exactly where my money has gone to or communicate with airbnb. It all was up to me to sort things out with airbnb. They paid me (not Reginald) an extra $60 to cover the cleaning costs.
By the way, I noticed a few negative reviews where Reginald has replied saying that the guests were just scamming HIM to get a free room for a couple nights. This is bull. To pre-emptively respond to whatever nonsense he may respond to my feedback with let me just say: It is such a PAIN to have to go through a cancellation on airbnb and he was not helpful at all in sorting the problem out. In the end we had to book a place at the last minute for an entire month and because so few places were available, we had to spend almost twice the money we had budgeted.
My lesson learned: Read up on airbnb scams and if a host tells you that their place is "not available" for any reason after you already booked it, don't go! contact Airbnb ASAP.