I really wanted to leave a glowing 5-star review because, when we first arrived I was obsessed with…read morethis place.
My boyfriend, our dog, and I ended up booking this B&B last minute after leaving another accommodation early because it had bugs (including a camel spider in our bed ). We found this place online at resnexus.com as well Yelp and stalked their website, loved the photos, read the reviews, and immediately felt relieved when we arrived.
The Piñon Casita was adorable, the property itself is beautiful, breakfast was delicious, and the hosts seemed friendly. For the first hour or so I was thinking, Thank goodness, we finally found the place.
Unfortunately, things slowly started going downhill from there.
The first night, the fireplace wouldn't work. We messaged the hosts, sent photos, tried troubleshooting it ourselves, and eventually just gave up and accepted we'd be having a fireplace-free evening. It wasn't the end of the world, and we figured hey, stuff happens.
The next day they came and fixed it, which we appreciated. Then came the washer.
One of the reasons we were excited about this casita was because it included a washer and dryer. Earlier in the week we'd already spent time at a laundromat, so we were looking forward to doing laundry before our 8-hour drive home.
We started a load and got a 4E error less than halfway through the wash. We looked it up ourselves, we tried troubleshooting, we messaged the hosts, we followed their suggestions, and we tried different cycles. At this point I felt less like a guest and more like the on-call appliance technician.
They eventually told us the washer had been fixed while we were out hiking, so we were excited to finally do laundry.
Spoiler alert it wasn't fixed. Same error. We tried again later that evening. Same issue. Then around 11 PM the washer completely shut off and locked our wet laundry inside.
We messaged the hosts again because we were supposed to leave the next morning after breakfast and start an 8-hour drive home.
The response that frustrated us most wasn't even the broken washer, it was being told that because we hadn't specifically mentioned on the phone that we intended to use the washer and dryer, (And she said that they don't accept same day bookings, but made an exception for us, though that was never communicated nor was this a policy written anywhere on their website) compensation wouldn't be considered.
Respectfully, if an amenity is advertised, guests shouldn't have to announce ahead of time that they plan on using it. That's like asking if the shower works before booking because you intend to shower.
We weren't asking for a huge refund. We weren't asking for hundreds of dollars back. Even a small gesture of goodwill $50 to $100 off the stay would have gone a long way and would have shown that they understood the inconvenience.
Instead, we paid full price despite having a fireplace that didn't work the first night and a washer/dryer that never functioned properly during our stay.
To add to that, there were also multiple spiders and bugs inside the casita. I understand this is the countryside and bugs exist. Trust me, I get it. But after literally leaving our previous accommodation because of bugs, it wasn't exactly what we hoped to deal with again.
The next morning our laundry was still trapped in the washer. Eventually my boyfriend ended up figuring out the breaker issue himself after staff told us where the breaker panel was located. We rushed to get our laundry spun and dried before checkout, but they still weren't completely dry.
So instead of leaving relaxed after a nice getaway, we ended up starting our 8-hour drive home later than planned with damp laundry shoved into a trash bag.
The frustrating part is that this review could have been completely different.
The property is beautiful, the breakfast was genuinely fantastic, the casita itself is cute and cozy. And honestly, if the hosts had simply acknowledged the inconvenience and offered even a small amount of compensation, I probably would've happily overlooked most of this.
Instead, we left feeling like the burden of fixing the problems fell on us while still paying full price for amenities we couldn't properly use.
It's a lovely property, but unfortunately the way these issues were handled means we won't be returning.
