Air B&B under Duress! 🌎 The 24 hour stopover travel blog! 🌎steemCreated with Sketch.

in #life6 years ago

Hi guys, back again! Today I though id write about my experience renting an Airbnb accommodation during the World Cup in Russia!

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As soon as you pencil in your holiday dates, you excitedly lurch into meticulously planning every detail of your perfect experience from the accommodation and transport to the top tourist spots and eateries, comparing locations, travel distances, pros, cons, value for money and on and on till your brain melts and you finally give up popping your weary eyes back in their sockets. You then start to contemplate how appealing spending your time off sorting out the loft topped off with a watching some travel docs in the evening would be. Only to find yourself searching through your laptop’s history trying to remember the pages where you’d.seen the best deals.
There are however, occasions when this saturation of dizzying options are not available. This lack of choice overrides the well known economic premise of supply and demand.

These are:-
A) B) C)
-When you book an authentic loft over a yak milking shed in the middle of nowhere
-When you are booking at the time of a major sporting event and/or
-When you hand over the booking organisation to the stingiest member of your travelling group.

Unfortunately I had the misfortune to endure all three of the above. The sporting event was, as you’ve probably guessed, the World Cup. OK, Kaliningrad did not quite qualify as the middle of nowhere but as a friendly local observed, up to this mindblowingly well organised sporting event, seeing a tourist was about as rare as rocking horse poo. Finally the stingiest traveller who took on the booking responsibility was my mum. You might argue that 100€ per night is hardly stingy but it was, as she constantly proudly reminded us, exactly half the cost of any of the other similarly badly photographed apartments on offer.

‘Well that surely should have rung alarm bells’ I hear you thinking and you’re so right. Not just because it was half price but once the footie has finished, the only tourists to show up there will probably be riding in on rocking horses so these guys wouldn’t care two hoots for the essential component of guaranteeing future bookings - the review.

My mother justified the previously described blurry pics of dark brown 1970’s furniture, swirly carpets and Indian take-away wallpaper by saying it would get us all in the mood to relive life in Stalinist Russia, ( people of her generation are convinced all Russians wear gloomy overalls, live to serve the Communist party by slogging away on long shifts in factories, and find their only respite in the oblivion found in their rationed vodka) I think the vodka bit was the only reasonable part of her argument as it was an essential requirement to get any chance of even a snippet of sleep .

O just to run you through what the owner nonchalantly showed us as we walked up the stairs trying not to heave as the stench of cat pee pervaded our nostrils. Essentially what we’d walked into was a 50 year time warp with spiders webs to match. The sleeping arrangements were two sofa beds whose ancient ‘cushions’ made your yoga mat look snug and bouncy.

(Picture of the bedroom that we were paying 100$ a night for) :
BedroomKal.jpg

We soon realised why no photos of the bathroom were featured. I’ll be considerately scanty with the details but suffice to say melting the toilet seat onto the rim does save on screws They had generously left a bowl and and a contraption that only my mother could identify as a spin drier in case you felt the urge to wash out your smalls.

(Bathroom)
BathroomKal.jpg

Fortunately the food in the town of Kaliningrad was delicious and inexpensive so we didn’t ever venture into the kitchen. I particularly recommend the Zotler Bar Leninskiy Ave., 3, Kaliningrad 236006, for its sausage platter and the Borsch and Salo Ploschtschad Pobedy, 10, Kaliningrad, Kaliningradskaya oblast 236006 which, as the name suggests, serves excellent borsch

When you visit a new country and are fortunate enough to meet with the locals in a quaint bar, observe them from the luxury of a cafe terrace, or when renting, you see the intimacies of their homes. You ask yourself if they are representative of the country as whole or just the odd kind/ generous/weird/ totally not house proud individual.

I’m sure where we had the misfortune to stay/pay through the nose for is not representative of the Russian idea of cleanliness and interior design (Mr Ikea hadn’t been born when this place was furnished) nor that all of them are TV addicts obsessed with time - every room had at least 3 clocks of varying sizes and a TV for which the owner aside from considerately leaving us some pre worn slippers also took time to write out a detailed TV guide in English in case we found watching the best footballers in world football in brand spanking new stadiums too tedious and we’d rather put our feet up (rickety table allowing) and watch some Russian soaps.

(TV guide the owner had left us)
Tv Guide Kal.jpg

Have you had similar experiences with AirBnbs pictures not matching what the real thing is actually like, or paying a lot extra just because of a special event? Let me know in the comments!
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Sorry to hear of your bad experience while attending the World Cup.

Here are a couple of pictures of my last AirBnB

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Not even clean sheets????

Bizarre how Airbnb gets away with these shit holes.

Oh my god that is shocking, you did leave a review behind I hope!? In my case there was really no point in leaving a review, they rented it out at an extortionate price as a one off for the World Cup. Nobody is going to ever rent it out again for sure!

Yeah, I left a negative review to warn others.

Oh wow. You have to be careful when renting Air BNB and Bookings.com My cousin had a similar outcome a few years ago in the Caribbean. He made the guy give him his money back because the place was disquieting.

Yeah, renter beware.

Nice you post

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Dear Robertolopez
Great narrative of your journey and stay.
The flair of writing is evident in your blogpost.

Thanks for your comment, happy you enjoyed it!

I never actually used Airbnb but I did use Couchsurfing a lot. One time I was in Sri Lanka, I decided to stay with a host who had hundreds of positive reviews. But the guy was actually charging for everything from food to the toilet paper (which is not really the spirit of Couchsurfing). I was more sad about the false advertising than the fact that I was charged for all of that and that the place was far from clean.

I have never couch surfed, but as far as I know the point is being able to stay over for free to then offer your own "couch" in the future, charging for toilet paper kind of goes against the main idea haha

That's really sad tbh, probably happened to a lot of people due to the high hotel prices at the World Cup! Hope you'll find a better place to stay at your next booking (:

Tbh we still had a great time, just laughed about it and went out to enjoy the vibe on the streets that the World Cup brings. (And stopped on the way back to the apartment to buy new sheets haha)

that's pretty horrifying. However, it being the world cup locale and all i bet you were just happy to be there at all. My experience with ABB has been quite positive although one time i was unaware that i was renting a room in a family home rather than a private place. I have to say it was a bit odd to come out of my room and walk past a family watching TV in order to go take a shower haha.

True, it being the World Cup I really couldn't worry less. We chose the cheaper option because we knew we would spend the day out, although the cheaper option was still 100$ a night.. Had a great time anyway, and thats what matters.

Never been that unlucky sharing a house without knowing, people know how to advertise! haha

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