Finally! I get to rant! That said, I will try and rant in a matter that is not too distracting to you the reader, and most importantly prepare you with some early warning signs about who may be a bad host.
When Things Go Wrong… Revisited
To get things rolling I would like to revisit an issue that I wrote about at length in a previous article about rental accommodations in Spain. That being, how do hosts respond when things do go wrong? I’ll begin with a direct quote from that article and follow that with a quick summary of my examples.
“When things go wrong… you need a supportive and helpful host. When you are staying in a place for a couple of months, it’s just like at home, things can happen. Something might break, a piece of equipment may stop working, or you may find the apartment is lacking something that you really need. Hopefully, you will have someone who will quickly help you solve your problem. I have found that this is usually the case.”
Fuengirola – 2019
Just prior to our arrival at our rental property in Fuengirola we were informed by the owner that she had renovated the apartment and that there was now an extra bedroom. No problems there… It was a lovely apartment… but the workers had advertently created a couple of problems during the construction process unbeknownst to everyone.
They had accidentally “nicked” the line for the Internet and television feeds. They both worked for a while but eventually gave out. And secondly, they had caused the shower drain to clog. Probably by washing their tools and other items in the shower.
The other major thing that happened was unrelated to the construction, and occurred when I pulled the oven door open one day and the entire face of it came off in my hand. So, lots of serious problems with lots of potential for an owner to mishandle the situation. Christina handled everything beautifully with no “muss or fuss”, and most importantly, very quickly – exactly how you would want a host to respond in these types of situations.
Marbella – 2022
I also wrote about an issue around payment for electricity related to our most recent stay in Marbella in that same article. I will speak to that again briefly here, but I really do need to talk about some of the other positive responses that Veronica the property manager made to issues that popped up.
Because we were trying to get to Spain and then to the apartment as safely as possible during what we had hoped would be the final stages of the pandemic, I asked Veronica for advice on how to best get to the apartment from the airport in Malaga.
Her response was to use WhatsApp to “phone me” at home to talk about a local Uber equivalent where drivers were being very protective of passengers and also to let me know that the taxi service was now much less expensive than previous years… probably because of the presence of Uber. She added that they too had invoked all kinds of safety measures for safe transport. During this call, she also arranged for us to get into the apartment two days early so we would not have to stay in a hotel in Malaga for a couple of nights after our arrival.
Yes, there was the problem with having to put coins into a machine to activate the heating that I discussed in the previous article. This was handled by Veronica to our satisfaction. If you read it, you would probably have noticed that I had written it while we were still in the middle of our stay. Near the end of our stay, we ran out of the coins that Veronica had left us to use, and when I mentioned that fact to her she suggested that we simply use our own coins and that she would come and reimburse us for them at the end of our stay. The short of it was – she did exactly that, and we did not have to pay for electricity.
The other thing that she did that impressed me was how she handled a situation that arose after we left the apartment. She was there doing the laundry that was left by us and she was unable to get the washing machine to work. She video called me using WhatsApp and we talked through all sorts of possible ways to get it operational, but at the end of it all when we finished up it was still not working. At no time did she accuse us of breaking it, or imply that if repairs were needed, we would have to pay for them. Well done, Veronica
Again, if you want to read about all these situations in greater depth, you can go back and read the previous article in which they are discussed at length… including photos of the transgressions. 🙂
Bad Host… When Things Go REALLY Wrong
Oh boy! The moment I’ve been waiting for – my opportunity to go off on a really bad host.
This took place with our very first rental experience on the Costa Del Sol in 2017. The unit itself was fine, but its owner presented us with an “interesting and rich rental learning experience”. There were issues!
Marbella – 2017
The rental did not even start off particularly well. Before we left home, I asked her how she would handle our arrival. She indicated that we would be met by the person in town who handled that for her. She simply provided us with the name and the phone number of the individual who would meet us at the apartment, and that we should call him when we arrived in town and he would connect with us.
I responded to her saying we would not have a working cell phone and I that would not be able to call him, and that we needed a different plan in place. She completely ignored my message, and I did not hear from her again before we left Canada.
Being experienced travellers and good problem-solvers, we simply took the bus from the Malaga airport to Marbella. We were hoping that there would be a payphone in the bus terminal. There was no pay phone, but the station employees let us use the phone in the office to make our call.
As it turned out, the contact person did not speak a single word of English. Using a primitive form of Span-glish I communicated to him that we were at the bus terminal, would grab a taxi, and head down to the building immediately. That worked. As it turns out, he was the superintendent of the building. If the owner had told me that, all we would have had to do was go directly to the building and track him down.
And now we turn to the very real substantial problems we experienced… of having a NOT PARTICULARLY HELPFUL host. Gaining entry to the apartment as it turned out, was the least of our worries.
Electricity
The first major issue was in fact electricity related. Shortly after we had arrived, we woke up on the Monday morning on the fourth day of our stay to discover that there was no electricity. I found the breaker panel and switched things on and off, nothing worked. I went and got the superintendent and managed to explain to him the problem and he couldn’t get it to work. He phoned the owner but that did not get immediate results.
Because we had lost our Internet, I had no easy way to communicate with her. I will spare you the details about going to seek public Wi-Fi and then getting Sims for our cell phones to get the job done. Suffice it to say that communicating about the problem was a long-drawn-out affair over the first day.
As it turned out, she had failed to pay her electricity bill for many months and the city had shut off power to the apartment. She explained that her electricity bills have been sent to some other address in Marbella and she didn’t get them, yada, yada, yada. I of course am thinking… you don’t get an electricity bill for six months and you don’t worry about it???
Eventually she agreed to pay for us to go to a hotel for the night and to compensate us for our meals. We found an inexpensive hotel and didn’t rack up a big dinner bill. The net cost to her was €103. 24. We were back in the apartment with electricity late in the afternoon on the second day. The actual receipts are shown in the image below. 🙂
You’re probably thinking. Well, it couldn’t get worse than that? You would be wrong.
Bed Size
Below is the picture of the master bedroom that was offered up in the online listing. In the post it stated that the bed in the main bedroom was a “king” bed. When we arrived, we discovered that in fact the bed was what we referred to in North America as a “double” bed, not even a queen size one. We ended up having to sleep in the twin beds in the second bedroom for two months.
As you can see in this picture you cannot determine what size the bed is. Why would you take a shot of a bedroom focusing on the view out the back window rather than showing potential clients the actual bed? Not good.
Waterfront Location
This next photo is also from the original listing on Airbnb. Along with this there were two other pictures of a nice waterfront scene with tables and umbrellas. Because you do not know exactly where the apartment is until you book, we were operating under the assumption that the unit was somewhere in this larger complex probably at the back away from the water, but that we would have access to all this. Neither of these photos had anything to do with the unit. I have still never found this waterfront setting anywhere in Marbella.
Showing photos that are clearly of the very public city waterfront or interesting parts of town is fine. Showing vague, residential photos that have nothing to do with the rental location without explanatory captions I find to be very misleading.
Documentation
The other thing that made it very difficult to settle into our rental situation was the fact that there was almost a total lack of written information or documentation. All she left was a couple of small sheets of handwritten notes that were not in the least bit helpful.
We constantly had to ask the superintendent for information that should have been provided – things like, what do we do with our garbage? For the record, on the Costa del Sol you need to take your garbage out onto the street and look for in-ground bins on the sidewalk in which to deposit it. This photo is an example of these from our 2022 stay.
Money
The final episode in this little series is one related to something this woman did that sent me truly over the top and caused me to go full “nutso-psycho” on her. There was a money issue!
After the poorly organized arrival, the lack of instructions, the king bed incident, the misrepresentation of the apartment’s location, and the power outage nightmare, it was clear that compensation had to take place. This is how it unfolded.
First the owner offered me a free week’s stay if we rented again the following year… yeah, not a real offer… not a chance, lady. Then she offered me an extra week tagged onto the end of our stay at the time… no… we have flights home booked etc. etc.
I suggested she compensate us a week’s rent for this year, i.e. €500. She finally agreed to this and suggested that she was coming down as we were leaving so she would reimburse us on the final day of our stay. Works for me.
She arrived on her final day, we kissed and made up, and she handed me a wad of €50 bills which I stuffed in my pocket. After getting to the Marbella bus terminal to catch the airport bus, I decided I should put the money in my wallet.
I pulled it out, unfolded it and what you see in the video clip below is what I got… €300. She had stiffed me for €300! I was expecting €500 for the agreed-upon free week and the €100 compensation to pay for the hotel and dinner.
I whipped out the phone and in the process of writing her my “psycho” message I get a communication from her… and I paraphrase… “Did I give you enough money because I went into my purse and found some extra €50 bills?”
I completed my “psycho” message informing her that she needed to send me the missing €300 to my mail address at home. Her reply was… again I paraphrase… “Oh, I thought the €500 was going to cover everything so that’s all I’m going to give you”.
The net result was I got a check from her eventually for €200. To show you how concerned I was that this might get legal, I immediately took a picture, and this short video clip of me talking about how she stiffed me for €300 with the wallet in my hand as you can see. Lesson learned… Some hosts will be “less than ideal”.
After you read all the above you probably thinking “this guy definitely filed all these grievances with Airbnb”. Airbnb does take complaints very seriously, so you should never worry about doing so if you feel so inclined. That said, you will probably be surprised to discover that I did absolutely nothing to that effect.
Through it all, the host did attempt to address our problems, albeit very poorly each and every time. At no time did she ever try to imply that we were thinking was a problem wasn’t. Nor did she get huffy about me pointing out these failings to her. In the end I thought, these probably were unintended mistakes on her part, and she was not trying to be deceitful or malicious. I came to the conclusion that she was simply… “swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool”. 🙂 I chose not to discuss the problems she caused for us with the Airbnb folks for that reason.
All of these problems were incredibly irritating and inconvenient but what made it even worse is that through the entire process the owner kept explaining to me that she was not a bad person and that it was a simple, unintended mistake… multiple times. That may have been true, but it wasn’t helpful. She clearly cared more about her reputation than our discomfort.
So be forewarned, you may come across a host who through their own general lack of caring or incompetence can make your stay less enjoyable.
Bad Host “Qualities”
I suppose one of the benefits of having had a really-bad host is that I know exactly what the warning signs are. This I can distil down under the oddly perverse heading of “bad host qualities”.
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- Not forthcoming with information in pre-rental contact
- Does not answer questions you ask clearly, or at all, before and/or after renting
- Online ad leaves out important information
- Hides or downplays additional charges e.g. electricity usage charge
- Photos in an online ad don’t give a complete picture or are misleading
- Provides only a limited number of photos of the unit and does not show any photos of the surrounding outside area
- Not willing to help you figure out how to get to the rental unit
- Provides very little or no written documentation or instructions in the unit
- Does not meet you in person, or the person who is sent to meet you is not particularly helpful
- Fails to take ownership for problems that occur
- Makes only a halfhearted effort to help correct problems
- Offers compensation that have no value for you e.g. Offer of an extra week stay when you are unable to take advantage
There, I feel much better getting all of that off my chest. 🙂 My hope is through reading about rental experiences that you are better able to assess what sort of host you are getting yourself involved with, and maybe what sort of action to take when problems arise.
