Insufficient internet service, possible dishonesty and not in the Arts District as described in the listing. - The whole story, with our app convo notes to corroborate what we are saying, will been sent to Airbnb -
I thought long and hard about this before giving a 2 star review. I usually just give 5 automatically, unless something really p’s me off and this person is a super host, so no one wants to be that one person who complains. This was a family vacation, and our expectations were quite basic, given that most of it would focus around my 7 y/o daughter going to Valley Fair, Mall of America etc.
We arrived late Sunday from Canada and were looking forward to a trouble free getaway, when we went to turn on a movie on Netflix and noticed that there was not stable nor adequate bandwidth on our internet access. My speed test showed 0.3mb per second. A very cheap and minimal connection is about 100 times that. We both work from home and are required to do the basics, such as log in to a VPN, send and receive emails etc., so I messaged the host, who did get back to us right away.
My girlfriend, who still wanted to do the trip with us, actually had to put in a full day of work from the property on Tuesday, so I explained that this was quite critical. But there should have been much time to remedy the situation, so I relaxed and had faith in our host.
Long story short, our host messaged us Monday afternoon, saying that he had contacted the provider and that there was an outage in our area. I have worked in the telecom industry and what he was saying did not add up to me, so I checked the company website for outages in service. There were none posted. So I email’d his provider directly and was told the same again... Just to be sure, I had them further look into their TDM coverage, which is the only (very cheap service) offered by US Internet in that area. This told me that he was being dishonest, so I pressed further regarding the fact that something wasn’t adding up and that we were demanding a fix immediately. He assured me that it was down and that he would further look into it. On Tuesday, our second day out of 3 to actually enjoy ourselves, he still had us waiting around until 1:00pm with a 7 year old who wanted to go do the things she was promised. Because my girlfriend needed to work this day, we didn’t want to leave her stranded without a resolution, as we would need to take the vehicle. So we waited around for him to send someone to come by and reset the router which was in another suite apparently. We anxiously messaged him a few times in the morning / afternoon explaining that this was holding us up from enjoying our very short vacation and that we had an upset kid who had been waiting for 5 hours to leave, without even a few kids shows to entertain them.
Eventually there was no fix, so I called out the host for providing inadequate service, just to save themselves money. I knew that the router and pipe were being shared with other suites or homes, because we did not have a router of our own and it was quite apparent that if he was going to do that, that he would have to subscribe to a faster service using better equipment.
By the end, we went through a couple hundred dollars in roaming charges. While we were gone Tuesday, my girlfriend had to be dropped off to work for 7 hours first at a coffee shop, then Uber back and fourth to eat etc. as there weren’t any other restaurants within a mile etc. of course paying for food and drink everywhere that she went. - What added insult to injury, is that this was a short trip and she had started much later than planned Tuesday, due to the empty promises that we had waited around for all day. As such, it ate into our evening and put a very bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing.
Which brings me to the last part, that this property is NOT in the arts district. It’s close, but being told what we were there created an assumption that we could walk to coffee shops, food patios etc. This was not the case.
I am fine with a properties at a certain price point, not being able to offer all of the things that some customers might enjoy. But what I cannot stand, is dishonesty. Though there is a minuscule chance that I am wrong about what I am assuming, no company that provides Internet, would have a 3 day outage without knowing about it, yet would tell only the host that the Internet is down, but not someone else but not us (at basically the same time).
Lastly, it is clear by google maps and what locals said when we asked them, that we were sold a location that was not as described. I would have completely ignored this, and just bit the bullet for a couple of Ubers, had it not added to an already very frustrating situation. My advice to this host is to be honest, be straight up and tell the truth moving forward. This way, problems that arise won’t come back to bite you.