In summary:
If you use Airbnb to avoid large rental corporations and work with hosts who are real people, do not book with Evonify. If you don’t mind waiting hours and days to have issues addressed, this is a great price for the neighborhood.
The good:
Furnishings and amenities were exactly as described, kitchen and bathroom were recently updated, self-checkin was smooth and easy, and the upholstered furniture was very clean—lines from a vacuum were visible in the fabric!
The bad:
It looked like the floors had been complete skipped in the cleaning—hair, dust bunnies, food wrappers, and sticky spills where in every room, and the living room rug was stained and visibly gross. Every A/C vent was covered in dust and there was no A/C filter in the intake vent. So all that dust and dirt was just being recirculated throughout the apartment.
The worst:
Evonify is a big rental company that’s just using Airbnb to find customers. Once you reserve, they push you to their own website in order to manage your rental and pay extra fees. When we checked in and saw the floors, I messaged our “host” on Airbnb. I got a message from a customer support rep who told me she sent my message to the “concern department” and to please wait. Then I got an email notifying me that my support ticket had been received about 12 hours later. The next day, we still had no useful response from Evonify and the deadline to cancel and still received a refund for our third night through the rest of the reservation was about to pass at 11am, so we found another Airbnb and cancelled the rest of our stay after that first night.
Evonify accepted the cancellation, but claimed I hadn’t paid a pet fee, even though it had not only been paid, but they’d sent me a receipt for the payment. It wasn’t until I sent a screenshot of their own receipt that they acknowledged the payment. They also claimed they had completed a “detailed & thorough investigation into the reported issue with the cleaning situation, it was revealed that the cleaning team did indeed clean the unit properly and there were no sticky floors, Dirt or wrappers in the unit after the cleaning was completed”. I asked how they explained the photos I’d sent if that was the case and was told, “we’re not renting out luxury units by any means.”
Ultimately it was a totally understandable oversight (forgetting to sweep and mop the floor) that could have been very easily fixed, but Evonify completely botched it instead.
The unavoidable:
LOTS of noise from neighboring units. This is a first-floor unit in an older building. The upstairs neighbors weren’t being excessively noisy, but we could hear their every move—walking around, talking, running water, and flushing toilets.