I regret that I cannot recommend this accommodation. There are several things in the plus column. The location is ideal for anyone doing work at Stanford. The walk to the library was easy and beautiful. Excellent restaurants and a Caltrain station are a ten-minute walk away. There’s a kitchen in the unit’s common area and, even better, a washer and dryer. The room was clean and spacious. The bed was too soft and the furniture very spare, but both were acceptable. The minuses, however, were strong disadvantages.
Communication was not always complete or intelligible. When I arrived, the key instructions made no sense—because as it turned out, the person in the unit’s other bedroom had locked the glass storm door, which meant I could not get to the key box that would let me into the house. Kathy came right away—it took about 15 minutes—but she couldn’t unlock that door either, so she simply went in the other door to let me in. When I went into the unit’s small common area, I noticed another guest, a young man, was in bed in the other room, with the light on and the door partly open. Kathy went to that door and shut it vigorously. I wonder if that other guest was a family member. In my bedroom, the air was hot and stifling. Kathy turned on the in-room AC but didn’t notice that the exhaust pipe leading from the back of the unit to the vent in the window had come off the unit. I didn’t notice it either, as I was headed out to eat before the restaurants closed. When I returned, the hot stifling air hadn’t abated, and I noticed then that the exhaust pipe wasn’t attached. I was able to reattach the pipe, but it was not a tight attachment. Sometimes the exhaust pipe would detach in the middle of the night, bringing even more heat and noise into the room. Even when the exhaust pipe was attached, the unit ran pretty loudly when the compressor was activated, sometimes loudly enough to awaken me.
The behavior of the other guest (if in fact he was a guest) was the biggest problem. He had a habit of coming in late—sometimes after midnight—and turning on the light in the commons area, light that spilled into my room. Often that light would stay on the entire night. My bedroom door was quite thin, and I could hear the guest’s movements in the kitchen—and he was not careful about the noise he was making. Even worse than that, on two nights the guest cooked supper well after midnight, flooding my room with very sharp and intense odors of cooking, so much so that I’d again wake up. After one cooking session in the wee hours, the guest and a companion didn’t even bother to clean up their dishes, so the next morning I was greeted by dirty dishes with rotting food residue, including a container with eggshells. Those same dirty dishes were there the next day, too.
I’ll own the fact that I did not tell Kathy of my concerns. I wanted to do my work, keep quiet, and hope for the best. I was also concerned that the other guest was rude enough that he might somehow retaliate if he thought I’d complained to Kathy. At any rate, I have learned my lesson, and in the future I will not stay at an Airbnb location unless the host has earned distinction and the accommodations have earned glowing reviews. The price and location in this case were great, and Kathy seems like a nice person, but the discomfort wasn’t worth it.