This is a hard review to write. My experience here was not awful, but it was stressful. When I booked the place, I knew there would be a cat, and I thought that would be fine, but despite what the host said, that I would simply be responsible for feeding her, I ended up feeling like I had to take care of her. The cat was extremely thin and didn’t want to eat for the first few days we were there. I had to make a choice of letting her not eat, or coaxing her to eat and leaving her food out all day long for her to nibble at. Leaving out the food caused the apartment to smell and, if I opened the window to air out the apartment, attracted flies. By the end of the first week, the cat was better adjusted and ate better, but by then I regretted having booked the apartment to begin with.
The other source of stress with this booking had to do with communication. Mariluz asked me not to communicate directly with her because she would be on vacation with limited access to WiFi, but with a friend of hers. Normally, that would be fine, but her friend was not a native English speaker, which made communication difficult, and had phone problems, which made for long delays between our few attempts to communicate. Moreover, both she and Mariluz mentioned that her friend was a single mom with two jobs – which made me feel guilty bothering her at all. After the first few days, I ended up texting Mariluz directly and waiting for her daily Internet connectivity, which was perfectly satisfactory for me, but I felt like I was violating Mariluz’s wishes by bypassing her friend. I communicated my frustration about this to Mariluz but did not get a satisfactory response.
There were other little things about this apartment that also made it less than ideal. For example, there was no information folder/binder, there were no trash bags for the garbage cans (Mariluz’s friend brought them over on day three), and the vacuum cleaner needed to have been emptied before our arrival so that I could clean up after ourselves and the cat. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this apartment.