This apartment is in a great location in an expensive city and for that reason alone is a good place to stay for one or two nights. Unfortunately, we had a much longer stay and so we experienced the cumulative impact of lots of minor inconveniences, which made our stay quite frustrating and I regretted not having booked elsewhere.
The positives:
- location;
- plenty of light in the bedroom;
- character (I was expecting things like street noise and this is a part of the charm of being in NY).
The negatives:
- the apartment is much more worn down / less welcoming than the pictures suggest.
- kitchen was tiny (to be expected) but also very ill-equipped, so it was not practical to cook meals in the apartment. Glasses, cookware, etc that we pulled out of the cupboards were really dirty. This is a shame because the ability to cook is one of the reasons to get an Airbnb over a hotel when you’re there for a longer stay.
- living area was not a pleasant place to hang out. The couch looks directly at a big wall of open shelving with bulk supplies of toilet paper, linen, etc, with a TV in the middle of it all.
- sleep was difficult because the radiator in the bedroom was hissing and clanging very loudly, the street light came right through the blinds, and we were each provided with only one very thin pillow.
- check in and check out using a lockbox at a 7/11 didn’t go smoothly (there was a technical problem on checkout), and the 7/11 was quite a long way from the apartment which is inconvenient if (like us) you are carrying a lot of luggage.
- the toilet overflowed on several occasions which was pretty gross. These things happen in old buildings, but again it was the cumulative impact ... by the time I was standing in toilet water I was already feeling pretty worn down by other inconveniences.
We were also quite creeped out to discover that the host had entered the apartment without prior arrangement or permission, and he didn’t even tell us he had done so until we noticed a bag of laundry missing and contacted him to ask about it. (I had messaged to ask if there were login details for subscription services on the TV because these hadn’t been provided, and to ask what to do with the towels that we had used to clean up after the toilet overflowed, since we had been instructed to use only one towel each. These were both matters that I expected would have been answered by return message rather than through an unannounced visit to the apartment while we were out.)
All in all, it felt like the sort of Airbnb that churns through lots of guests without attention to the things that make a stay comfortable. I couldn’t help thinking about how much we had paid relative to the cost of making tiny improvements like buying a basic pot and pan at IKEA, putting up some blinds that block out the street light, even hanging some cheap fabric to cover the open shelving so the view from the couch isn’t forty rolls of toilet paper.
As someone who likes to keep to myself when I’m travelling, I also didn’t like having to contact the host so frequently - often my queries related to basic things that should probably just be included in the welcome instructions to guests (login details for the TV, instructions to deal with the hissing radiator, etc). Staying in this apartment just felt like a lot of work.
I hope some of these things can be improved for future guests!