To start off this review, I would like to clarify that we are not a bunch of naïve tourists that have never travelled the world. We know that when going to warm countries, it is more than likely to see different kinds of bugs and we accept that. However, the number of cockroaches we had to deal with in this villa was unacceptable. We had around 30 cockroaches in the rooms over the first 3 days. It got so bad that members of our party felt safer to sleep on the couch in the living room on the second night. To be clear, this was not our only complaint. However, when we contacted the host to let them know what was going on they played it down and basically told us there was nothing they could do and to get over it. We are a group of 12 people, one from America and one from Greece. We have travelled all over the world – some of us have been to Australia and none of us have ever had to deal with this level of bug infestations. We have been to Spain, collectively, over 50 times – I do not accept the Airbnb hosts comments of how it was normal to see this numbers of bugs. Please note that we moved villa on day 3 to a villa in the same area (same distance from the sea) that had put precautions in place for bugs in the area and for the remainder of the holiday we did not see 1 more cockroach.

As mentioned before, this was not our only complaint. However, the Airbnb host seemed to treat it as though it was the only issue and dismissed us. One of the bathrooms in the first bedroom on the first floor was stinking of raw sewage – to the point that the smell spread into the living room. We had to air out the living room and the bedroom before people were able to sit there. Please be aware that we reported this to the host, and they dismissed this complaint because we mentioned cockroaches. In the same room, the shower in the ensuite bathroom leaked into the bedroom whenever using it. One of the other rooms down the stairs had a massive hole in the wall behind the headboard, where the cockroaches entered the villa from. There was also a footprint on the wall in this room, which shows that the villa has not been properly cleaned. The cleanliness of the villa was in question – the shower heads and jets in the baths were disgusting and had a build of up mould and rust. We also found an old toenail in one of the beds (in the room outside of the house) – which couldn’t have been the person who was in that bed because they had their toenails painted. This room also had a big hole above the sliding door and just seemed quite unclean. There were also reports from our group of there being bug droppings in areas of the villa and it being generally quite dusty in places (i.e. kitchen cupboards).

Another small issue is that a lot of the doors in the villa did not shut properly and it was a struggle to shut the main door down the stairs. This is not a complaint, this is just feedback for the owner.

When we made our complaint, the host asked why we didn’t say anything sooner. We are reasonable people who don’t like to complain. If it was just one thing, we wouldn’t have complained. We were trying to wait it out to see if things would improve but it just got worse over the first three days, and we felt we had to say something because we couldn’t stay there any longer.

When dealing with the host, they ignored my messages asking to return our tourist tax for the days that we were not staying in their villa anymore. This means that we then had to pay tourist tax twice, as we had to pay it again at our next villa.

To be fair, the villa started off well – when we arrived there was beers, a small bottle of champagne in the fridge and biscuits on the dining table for our arrival, which was lovely. We are just very sad to say that it went downhill from there and the communication from the host was not great.