During the recent 35C3 we booked an apartment in the heart of Leipzig through booking.com. We couldn’t find anything reasonable in AirBnB for that time-window and hotels weren’t an option either. We quickly settle on StadtHaus by Hentschels Apartments due to what we saw on the website and also due to reviews on booking and other sites.
Sadly, when we arrived on 26 December we were greeted by the first surprise: Nobody was there at noon and nobody picked up the phone. There was just a piece of paper on the front-entrance telling us that we should have received an e-mail with further instructions. Well, no. We hadn’t received such a mail which caused us to call them in the first place. At least the cleaning crew was there, though, and we could at least put our luggage into their room and could start to explore the city. According to the reservation and ignoring that notice on the door, our room should be available by 3pm, so we thought, we’d check back later. Luckily, that worked out and we had our suitcases inside the apartment.
At first sight, the apartment was beautiful. Everything was white, modern, newish furniture and simply comfortable. As this was an apartment we also had a fridge and a complete kitchen. The beds were arranged in a way that resulted in one family room for three people and another large bed in the living room. Perfect!
We noticed one thing, though: It looked like the shower hadn’t been cleaned from the previous tenant as there were some hairs lying around that clearly didn’t belong to any of us. We contacted the front-desk and went for more sight-seeing expecting it to be fixed in the evening. Well, yes, the bath was cleaned but we finally discovered the reason why the hairs had still been there before: The shower’s water-drain was completely clogged. Whenever you leave the shower running more than 5 seconds there is enough water to fill it up.
After a bit of shower-scheduling-magic we reported this to the front-desk in the morning and the drain had been cleaned by the time we returned to the apartment in the evening. Finally carefree showering 😀
Sadly, the night before we discovered another issue, this time with the beds. While they were clean and everything, the bedding (esp. the sheets) was completely synthetical, felt extremely cheap and bad on the skin, and was too short for people taler than 180cm.
Other than these two problems (which may or may not be complete dealbreakers for you) the apartment was really nice and functional. We somehow still got the impression, that the room had been tuned for the Instagram-crowd 😒 The drain-issue, though, should have been discovered by the cleaning-crew at least when we reported the hair on the first morning. This combined with the cheap bedding will probably make us look for other options for 36C3 in 2019.
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