We had the most horrible night at this Airbnb due to the host recently painting all of the woodwork in this Victorian bedroom with gloss paint. My eyes were stinging, my nose and throat were burning. My husband was exhausted as our check in wasn’t until 4:00 PM so we had from 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM walking around sightseeing to kill time in Kirkwall.
He didn’t want to leave to find alternative accommodations. I saw a hotel down the street, which he agreed that if they had availability we would move, but they didn’t. We could only get one window to open; the rest of the windows were painted shut. When we saw the host we told him the paint bothered us. He just said it was recently decorated and that it should air out by keeping the window open; it didn’t because all of the painted woodwork was around the windows.
We found a fan and had that in front of the windows and my husband found a face mask in his first aid kit for me to wear. The next morning we asked the table of two other couples if they were bothered by paint fumes, one couple also noticed the fresh paint smell, the other couple didn’t (their room wasn’t painted). When the host came into the room and asked how we slept I told him that the paint fumes bothered me and he acted like I was crazy and stated that no one else complained (the other couple didn’t speak up). Frankly, it was embarrassing.
On the way out I asked for a receipt and they couldn’t be bothered to get me one. Instead, they rehashed why I should be so bothered by paint fumes. When we got home, I made a list of complaints which I posted on Airbnb and Tripadvisor. When he read them he went off his rocker and started accusing us of being nightmare guests and advising people to avoid us like the plague.
He even went so far as to read through four years of my Tripadvisor reviews and to look me up on the internet trying to look for any dirt on me he could find. The worse he could find was that I complained about odours a few times and had three complaints of food related illnesses out of 250 reviews. I’m just hoping his nasty response shows him in a bad light. They are nothing but a pair of liars and scam artists.