My husband and I spent two weeks in October at Morag's place in Darlinghurst to visit our son in Sydney.
The area and the apartment
The apartment had all amenities as detailed in the description and the bed as well as the small balcony. The bed was very comfortable and made our stay pleasent. In terms of location, the apartment is definitely in a great spot with cafes and pubs around the corner. We could easily walk everywhere within the city area and selected the apartment for this reason as well.
Cleanliness
The room was indicated to be cleaned before we arrived, however we saw e.g. spider webs within the wardrobes which certainly showed that there hasn't been cleaned or for a while. The kitchen itself seemed to be also lacking cleaning as benchtop as well as kitchen utensils seemed to be greasy. The fridge was entirely full of 'stuff', which made it particularly difficult for us to put something in (e.g. a couple of tomatoes in a bag). Also, the apartment and the host provided us with a booklet stating that there could be insects etc. around and we should not surprised to meet them. However, endeavouring a couple of cockroaches throughout the stay seems to be common practice for Australia, which we could deal with. In addition to that, the dog pooping on the balcony because nobody is willing to take him out seemed in this place pretty normal too - something we have not encountered before.
The host/ the service
Approximately in the middle of our two week stay we have been told off in a very rude manner by the host that the room we have booked would apparently be only 'Bed and Breakfast' (as the name of the website is also AirBnB...). This happened one night as we intended to use the kitchen to heat up some food. She mentioned that none of her other guests would have made food that late. We were very surprised that host mentioned in a particularly rude manner that it would be too late to heat up some dinner at 8:30pm (given that people in Australia are not eating that late, and obviously we are supposed to stick to that) and she feels disturbed while watching TV. As we indicated that the ad calls out that that there is a kitchen and living room for preparing light dinners and communal use, she told us off we should have booked one of her other properties which provides fulltime access to these areas and would have not required her to be that accomodating.
She referenced the previous night and accused us being rude that we made dinner and apparently disturbed her while she was concentrating on the TV. In addition to that, she mentioned she would have been very accomodating in order to accept our booking for two weeks. Obviously there would have been an option to not accept the booking if the host would have had these concerns in the first place.
Hence, she asked us to go and spend time somewhere else.
We were particularly disappointed with the hospitality of this apartment as the atmosphere got slightly toxic after this fallout and there was a constant vibe of 'go and leave me alone'. Not sure if there have been any other reasons for the fallout, this is at least what has been mentioned.
In a nutshell; very unprofessional and definitely not the style of how to treat guests in our opinion. If you want to have guests that you basically never see (which is fine too) then just advertise clearly that you do not want them to be around. It's certainly not okay to act rude because people from other areas do have other movements than you may be used to it. Also, describing yourself as 'accomodating' just because you have accepted their booking is just a bad joke.