Rather than a narrative, I think a simple list of pros & cons is best for this review.
PROs:
-Good location, shops and restaurants within 5-10 min walk, 2 T Stations within 15 mins, beautiful riverside park within 5 mins.
-Great communication. Property is owned by a group and someone always responded to messages very quickly.
-Smooth check-in. You never actually interact with another person; they just give you instructions for retrieving the key from a lockbox and voilà, you’re home sweet home.
-They provide plenty of “supplies” like shampoo, toilet paper, towels, etc. I’ve stayed several places where they barely give you any and you have to make an annoying trip to a grocery or convenience store to buy soap or whatever. This place was well-stocked.
-Beds are super comfortable.
-2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms is actually pretty hard to find in Back Bay. Both bathrooms are pretty much en suite (one is fully en suite, the other has access from the hall and the bedroom so if you just leave the hall door closed, it’s basically en suite). We were sharing with another couple, so that privacy was important to us.
-Cleanliness. The place was clean; no issues there.
- The location was very quiet. While this unit has its own washer & dryer inside, there is another laundry area right outside your door and one night we heard someone doing laundry out there but other than that we never heard another person. And traffic noise was minimal/barely, if at-all noticeable.
CONs:
-The furniture (except for the beds which are great) is lacking in both quantity and quality. There is a dining table but no chairs, just a small bench on one side. The sofa is pretty worn and not that comfortable. And there’s a little armless chair that has also seen better days and is not comfortable.
-The patio is kind of pointless. It looks onto an alleyway and you really wouldn’t want to spend any time out there.
-The place needs some general work. There are tiles coming off the wall in the 2nd bathroom, for example. And the can lights don’t fit the recesses for them so you can see the holes they cut in the ceiling. The hot water handle in one of the bathroom sinks leaks a little. It’s just poor workmanship and/or maintenance and while it’s not a huge deal because it’s still functional, it’s aesthetically unpleasant and does not live up to the all caps LUXURY in the listing.
-There’s a large disparity in size and quality between the two bedrooms and bathrooms. For some, this won’t even be an issue but because we were splitting the place with another couple, it is awkward to decide who gets the large room with a king bed and nicer bathroom and who gets the smaller room with a full size bed that barely fits and the not so nice bathroom.
Regarding the hosts:
-Our flight arrived well before check-in and they were unwilling to accommodate us when I asked to just drop our bags off so we didn’t have to lug them around the city while we killed time for 6 hours. When I asked, they just gave me a list of businesses where we could pay to store our bags. We ended up using Vertoe and leaving our belongings in the back room of a dingy little bodega all day. This is my 5th AirBnB stay and it’s the only one that wouldn’t accommodate that request.
-So there is a lengthy list of house rules and conditions to agree to, which is absolutely fine. But 2 days before check-in, they messaged me with MORE rules and conditions, some of which were not in the original set you can see in the listing. For example, THEY USE SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS ON THE PROPERTY TO WATCH YOUR COMINGS AND GOINGS AND MAKE SURE YOU ARE FOLLOWING THEIR RULES. While this may not bother some, we found it very creepy and off-putting. And because they only told us that 2 days prior, it was well beyond the window for getting a refund and finding other accommodations. I have no problems with following the host’s rules (and we of course did) but that should all be disclosed in the listing.
-For all the reasons above, all in all, not the best value. While 2 bedrooms/2 baths is hard to find in the area (and to be clear, Back Bay is an expensive area), the 4 of us agreed that it was overpriced for what it is.