We spent four nights in this apartment very close to the heart of old Bari, just a few blocks away and very close to the pedestrian walking areas near it. It was a fantastic location that cannot be beat.
The unit is on the fourth floor of a very secure building. There is a locked outer door from the first floor vestibule to the street and then a fairly strong door to the unit itself. There were two small elevators for the building, and the apartments are situated on the outside of an inner courtyard that was open to the sky so the hallway in front of the apartment could get wet with rain.
When you walk into the unit there's a closet across from the front door and a galley kitchen to the left. All IKEA furnished items. There was a bottle of sparkling water in the fridge and a very large bowl with dozens of coffee pods for the Nespresso machine and they also had sugar packets.
Across from the galley kitchen was a table that's at six and behind that an IKEA couch with pillows. Beyond that kitchen and dining area there was a couch in across from it a large screen TV with Netflix and HBO and local channels.
The bathroom had a toilet, bidet, extremely small shower, and a large sink with two drawers underneath for storing toiletries.
The bedroom had a storage closet and a chest of drawers upon which there was another TV.
All of the furnishings were new IKEA items and at this point in good shape.
The kitchen itself was very sparsely outfitted in terms of utensils and cooking equipment. There were about eight large dinner plates, and the same number of small plates and bowls however, there were only six large forks, knives and spoons and four serrated steak knives. There were no tall drinking glasses, only two or three short ones, although there were plenty of wine glasses, both red and white and a corkscrew. If you are not going to cook, then there's more than you need, if you were going to make anything in the oven or be doing any kind of cutting this place didn't make it. We had to go out and buy a chefs knife and we muddle through with the tiny cutting board that was there, because we couldn't find a medium size plastic one at nearby stores that we could fit into our suitcases.
We travel a lot and have used many vacation rentals so we have a lot of experience and can tell that these folks want to do well however they must be novices because they were missing explaining some really critical pieces of information and did not have a few amenities that 95% of vacation rentals include.
First off on a few things that they need to do better:
1. Put a note by the washing machine and oven explaining how to use them, and most importantly stating that you can't run both at the same time otherwise you blow a circuit and they need to call someone to come in and repair it. All that really means is that they pull the clothes washing machine out and reset the power strip that is under it. A simple explanation and we would've avoided multiple texts and three visits from different people trying to get things to work.
2. Set up a manual for the house that would include number one above, and a few other pieces of critical information such as how to close the shower door magnet strip to magnet strip so water doesn't get all over the floor. It is a tiny shower and it's obvious that they've had a lot of water leaking out because the base is all full of mold and mildew because it's not clear how to actually close the two doors so the water doesn't come flying out.
There were six rolls of toilet paper in the drawer in the bathroom, and that was impressive!
For us, the worst thing of all was that the windows did not have screens, and although we are used to seeing that in Europe, we always rent places that have air conditioning so that we can sleep with the windows closed and mosquito free at night. This place was supposed to have air conditioning that worked according to the description on the booking site. However, it turns out that it is associated with the building's cooling and heating system and it only works between June 1 and October. It said it had AC on the description and we only booked there because it was supposed to have AC. We got chewed up by mosquitoes the second through fourth nights after having to open the windows because it was very warm in there when running just the fan. We asked the owner for a credit and he responded we "didn't need AC because it was not hot enough." That isn't the point! My skin reacts violently for weeks to mosquito bites (I had about 12, 7 on my face) so we need places with window screens and/or AC - regardless of the weather and ge advertised it as having AC.
Other than this major AC mis-representation we liked the place well enough.
Not sure I understand why most Europeans don't use screens on windows! read more
