This was a terrible experience for our group. We have stayed at places all over the world—from 5 diamond resorts to various airbnbs.
W would never stay in one of Lynne’s listings ever again. We have enough negativity in our lives right now and it’s just easier to avoid such people. Especially since there are much nicer places managed by some really amazing super hosts in Seattle.
The listing is managed by Seattle Vacation Homes/Lynne. We were unable to stay in our confirmed listing as the previous guest’s flight was cancelled. We agreed to be flexible and stay in another listing owned by this host (not sure if it’s listed—the host sent us a link outside of Airbnb’s website). However, as far as we could see, the host never updated our reservation on Airbnb’s website. Lynne offered early and late checkin/out host entice us to take this other listing. She (Lynn) said it was a mile from our reserved place. We were not told that the place was at the top of a series of hills and that we would have to navigate a bunch of stairs just to get to the front door. Usually not an issue—except that Seattle was in the middle of a blizzard—and we could not get any taxis to even attempt those incredibly icy snowy hills.
After hiking half a mile from the clearest intersection to the townshouse, we all promptly slipped and fell down the icy steps leading down to the townhouse.
Apparently the maintenance guy lives in the building so it should have been taken care of, but we never saw those stairs cleared the whole two days we stayed there.
Once inside, it was disappointing to say the least. The bottom floor has a crib and bunk beds, while the master rooms are on the third floor (causing us to joke that the “kids” room was in fact the “naughty kids” room). The place was large but, in our opinion, was sparsely decorated compared the pictures the hosts had shared of the place. We felt that it was ranked on the lower end of accommodations available in Seattle. Especially in terms of
Location—-we booked capital hill and this place was in Madison Valley—doesn’t look far on a map, but, in our opinion. culturally it’s miles apart.
The place was clean enough—-except for the pots and pans which appeared grimy. The towels provided smelled stale.
We weren’t provided basic cleaning supplies (except for almost empty paper towel roll) or items you would expect in an Airbnb (like a wine opener or a functioning can opener). There were two microwaves, however, only one seem to work. . The light bulbs seemed to be a random a mix of different wattages. Maybe they were trying to use up whatever they had left over? Not sure, but we found it pretty odd. The battery in the fire alarm kept going off. The noise from the heater woke us up several times. The carpet was not consistently connected to the flooring, resulting in unexpected tripping hazardous all over the place. The host berated us for not telling them all of the issues in real-time?
… however, this was only a 2-day stay and we were just waiting out the blizzard so we could go to some place better.
We also found it odd that Lynne texted us a survey about the cleanliness of the house almost immediately upon check-in. This is just not enough time to determine the overall cleanliness of the home. She will keep texting you until you respond. In our experience, we provided a rating just so she would stop asking. Instead of trying to resolve the issues, she later used
the rating we provided against us. She implied that our comments the towels were stale wrong as other guests had not complained. We felt attacked when she berated us for spilling a small amount of wine in our attempt to open the bottle without a wine opener (by pushing in the cork, fyi). We would have loved to cleaned this up ourselves but we had only had 1/3 of a sheet on the paper towel roll and no cleaning spray. We had to use the stale towels to shower. Later, we able to obtain some napkins that we used to wipe up the mess. . However, there were a few spots that we may have missed (on the easily cleaned hardwood floor).
We put trash and dishes away until the trash can and dishwasher were full. After we checked out, we received a set of messages of Lynne scolding us for not throwing away every piece of trash and clearing the dining table, and accusing of us trashing the place.
These passive-aggressive communications were seriously enough to send us back to therapy to work out our mean mommy issues. Though we do not feel it was warranted, we agreed to pay an additional $75 of the requested extra $150 cleaning fee (on top of the $180 cleaning fee for a 2 day stay we had already paid !!) just to never have to deal with her w we again.
You should be aware that the host requires you to sign a rental agreement with terms that appear to be much more strict than Airbnb’s terms. The specific terms are disclosed after booking, not before, and she has you register for her website and has you sign it the agreement there. Within hours of us booking, we thought we had a covid scare and Lynne told us that we could keep our reservation or cancel and only get the cleaning fee refunded. Later (after our stay) she said guests have 24 hours to back out of the agreement—not sure why she didn’t mention that earlier when we had the possible covid scare.