Airbnb breaks all holiday rental rules with luxury touches

Your dream vacation home looks lovely online – beds and sofas plumped up with pillows; kitchen kitted out with all necessities. Reality kicks in on arrival.

Holiday homes don’t always deliver in terms of amenities and generosity.

I suspect most readers of The Australian’s travel stories have experienced the great holiday-rental letdown. Your dream vacation home looks lovely online – beds and sofas plumped up invitingly with pillows, kitchen apparently kitted out with all necessities and bathrooms generously proportioned.

Reality kicks in on arrival. Let’s start in the kitchen, where a couple of blunt paring knives, a single dishwasher tablet, two coffee pods and a paper-thin tea towel set the tone. There’s an old non-stick frypan that promises to spice up any culinary creation with microplastics, and five mismatched wine glasses, one short of the six guests checking in. Some basics would be handy – olive oil, salt and pepper, maybe even cling wrap – but no; the cupboard is assiduously clean but bare.

The meanness extends to bathrooms, where a half roll of loo paper is meant to last four days, and the bedrooms, where pillows are rationed at one per person and either rock hard or utterly devoid of neck support. And when were those scatter cushions and throws last washed? The sofa was either the scene of a murder or a red wine mishap, and the barbecue could have been used for every democracy sausage sizzle since Bob Hawke was elected in 1983.

Kitchens are a regular source of disappointment in holiday rentals.

Ah yes, we’ve all been there. So imagine my surprise last weekend when I checked in to a three-bedroom Airbnb terrace in Melbourne to find that not only was our six-strong cohort going to be treated like guests, but like adults. The owners apparently had faith we wouldn’t stuff our suitcases with the dozens of spare hand soaps, laundry detergent tabs and toilet paper rolls. Even my caffeine-addicted companions couldn’t put a dent in the stash of coffee pods, and I was delighted to find a canister of fresh oolong loose-leaf tea – and, miraculously, a tea pot. A knife block was stacked with sharp blades, an antique cabinet shone with rows of glasses for all variety of tipples, and drawers were filled with gleaming stainless-steel pots and pans, and actual silver-plate cutlery.

This being a pet-friendly property, there were oversized jars filled with cat and dog kibble, and spare leads hanging on a hook. My goodness, we were even given extra towels to use in bathrooms, which had bottles of Aesop amenities that weren’t bolted to the walls.

I applaud the hosts for their generosity and their trust in us not to rob them blind. The only downside? The baby grand piano was locked, so there was a shortage of Chopsticks.

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